We’ll take the lo…
[Video]
[4.62]
Tim de Reuse: The Black Keys, but they sound even more like The Black Keys. It’s so dull, so woolly, and so welcoming: On paper those harmonies are unimaginative, but when they push into the scene the whole track saturates into a warm, fuzzy mess. What an incredibly expensive mess it must have been! Imagine the studio time, the touch-ups, the thousand-dollar FX suites devoted to replicating analog imperfection. This band got their start recording on whatever they had lying around, sure, but this is immaculately dirty: the aesthetic of recording on whatever you’ve got lying around. And yet I’ve got too much of a soft spot for this kind of atmosphere. It’s flawless as a demonstration of technique — a proto-track to not think about too hard, lest you notice that there’s nothing of interest under the impeccable moment-to-moment groove.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: If you took Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and scrubbed every bit of menace (which I swear to you they had back in the ’90s) and fun from them, you’d get the Black Keys, who are the dad rock version of blues. Which is why the Keys headline arenas while JSBX never played venues bigger than clubs — and real blues musicians generally don’t either.
[4]
Iris Xie: I wonder if “Lo/Hi” is meant to be a reference to Ella Fitzgerald’s “When I Get Low, I Get High.” I ask because it sounds almost as breezy and elongated as that song, except the Black Keys mix the sentiment with some mildly rumbly guitars and a brief solo, crunchy stomps and some muted female backups. It comes off as an indistinct theme song pitch for that one documentary about backup singers.
[5]
Stephen Eisermann: A song made to be listened to at your favorite dive bar, because the peppy guitar licks contrasting with Dan Auerbach’s gritty vocal make the whiskey go down easier. This is a song that is willing to commiserate with you, and man if that isn’t just what you need sometimes.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Among the reasons why I don’t hang out at bars with bands is the strong chance that the house band will sound like the Black Keys: excited about the possibility of playing to an audience, stuck with mere competence.
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: The one guitar is mixed a bit too high, leaving the rest of the instrumentation to congeal into a gray slosh. With “Lo/Hi,” the Black Keys try to create a slick rock song fit for the road — one that’s more about an overarching mood than anything else — and the resulting song comes and goes without leaving any impressions. Even beyond the banal lyrics, the chorus just chugs along with as little creativity and verve as the backing vocals would suggest.
[3]
David Sheffieck: It’s possible that never before in rock history has a “woo” sounded so joyless, and certain that never has a set of effects pedals this expensive attempted to compensate for so much.
[3]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I’ve probably listened to Brothers and El Camino more than nearly any other album that came out this decade, so I can definitively state that this is a Black Keys song. It’s not quite that they haven’t evolved at all over the past six years or so, but that they haven’t gone anywhere interesting.
[4]