Unlike a lot of bands that start out rock and end up pop, the Black Keys remain loyal to their sound, sculpting it into a masterpiece just as alluring as it is timeless. Brothers is a progression rather than a departure from Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney’s rock-solid trajectory. Deeply textured by the vast sum of knowledge and ability they possess, the duo harvests divergent genres with the greatest of ease. Here we have quintessential rock and roll effortlessly adorned with the woeful slide of blues, the layered distortions of psychedelia, the raw intensity of punk and even the hard-hitting groove of funk.
From the very first listen I fell into this album like a featherbed, lulled into a contented state of sonic bliss usually reserved for the kinds of bands distinguished enough to require only single word identification (Stones, Dead, Zeppelin…you get the idea). Yet the more I listened, the more I realized how brightly each individual track shines. The quality of this album as a whole is a result of its excellent parts.
The brilliance begins with “Everlasting Light,” the coolest straight-up love song I have ever heard, layering Auerbach’s scratchy falsetto and just a touch of tambourine over the kind of immortal strut that makes it impossible not to bob your head. But then, just when you are feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, here comes “Next Girl” with the bitten declaration “my next girl/will be nothing like my ex-girl/I made mistakes back then/I’ll never do it again.” It seems, somewhere in the space between tracks, the everlasting light has gone out. For Auerbach, we come to learn, love is not everlasting; it is messy and unfair and destructive and cruel. He is “bound to fall,” as he laments in the album’s winning single “Tighten Up” amidst sexy guitar riffs and a deliciously breezy backbeat. And fall he does.
Here is the human experience, from the yearning of “Howlin’ For You” to the loss of “She’s Long Gone” to the haunting realization of “Too Afraid to Love You,” in which Auerbach sings “I wish loneliness would leave me/but I think its here to stay” as soulfully as Roy Orbison might. Brothers progresses in fits and bursts, sailing over this rocky terrain with sweltering passion and relentless lucidity, sucking you into its jagged dimensions as they shift and shrink and swell.
Sometimes the demon, sometimes the victim, sometimes the frightened child, Auerbach covers a full range of emotions in a way both decidedly masculine and insistently nonexclusive. He understands the flawed and maddening cycle of the human condition, the mistakes we recognize and learn from but can’t stop making no matter how determined or self-assured we may be. “I am the bluest of blues/Every day a different way to lose,” he howls in “The Go Getter,” a rueful lament bringing to mind not only the classic blues of Muddy Waters but also, more specifically, the desolate languor of Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher.”
“Never Give You Up,” functions as the penultimate love song for the undeserving lover, paired with a sweet-as-sugar guitar riff that sounds almost wedding-like, and provides a worthy transition into the album’s final track, a ballad that reaches no real resolution but finds a kind of deprecatory sense of peace in acceptance. In essence, what it’s like to be human. “These Days” is not another cover of the inveterate Jackson Browne/Nico song of the same title, but its tone resembles the original’s melancholy self-reflection and provides a final tip of the hat to all the influential predecessors that made Brothers possible.
Clearly, to say I am obsessed with this album would be an understatement, but I’ve waxed poetic enough for one review, so I’ll wrap things up with one final analogy. Ready? Okay. Like a classic car with a brand new engine, the Black Keys are nostalgic, functional, and utterly badass. And they have the power to move you.
By Hilary Cadigan
