Day 13 - Black and Blue

Today The Black Keys released their newest album, “Turn Blue.” They’ve been around awhile, but I’ve only known them for the past five years or so and I like them quite a bit. I haven’t always been impressed with some of The Black Keys branding -- I think the intentional simplicity of their album artwork and merchandise design is maybe too overtly hip -- but the videos I’ve seen and articles I’ve read make them seem like they have a good sense of humor about what they do. The two-man band thing was a little gimmicky to me at first, but I saw them play without their backing musicians during one section of their concert, and they really pulled it off.

I downloaded the new album as soon as I saw it was available, and played through it as soon as I was home from school tonight. After one play (and currently on my second), I’m impressed so far. The overall tone is more dark and brooding than their previous album, “El Camino,” which had a couple of mainstream hits. This one seems to go in the opposite direction, not being concerned with whether or not they have big radio breakthroughs but instead putting together something that I can only imagine is much more personally expressive.

A lot of the songs start off quiet and gradually layer themselves into some painful sounding slow burns. Since the two guys are a guitarist and a drummer, both instruments are featured prominently throughout. I always pay more attention to the drumming than probably a lot of other people do, and even though there isn’t anything terribly complicated going on drum-wise here, it’s very effective. Rarely do they resort to a standard 4/4 time rock drum riff, but more often mix things up with some thick, head-bobbing rhythms to drive the songs instead. Putting a bluesy guitar on top of that adds up to the kind of music that I just don’t think there’s a lot of out there right now. The vocals trend into falsetto more often than they probably need to and there are passages of keyboards that sound mosquito obnoxious, but those are nit-picky things. It’s not mainstream work, and it might not be accessible for a lot of people, but it’s a strong, cohesive album. I can see this one getting a lot of plays from me in the coming months when I’m either in a very specifically introspective mood that this kind of music would augment, or if I need a good album to serve as the soundtrack to a long car ride after dark.

For the moment I’d still give the nod to “Brothers” as my favorite of their albums, but depending on how the summer goes, this one could give that a run.