The Black Keys are cool, that’s for sure.
Twenty-First Century Cool.
A two piece from Ohio with lo-fi recordings and retro-artwork on one hand and a kick-ass website with online merchandise and live performance clips on the other. They’ve got a sound both nasty and massive and yet they could probably tour the country in a Mini Cooper if they had to. They’re the best of what roots rock and the D.I.Y. spirit has come to represent in the last fifty years.
MOAN is a four-track e.p. that continues the rawboned blues (as Peter Relic describes the duo in Rolling Stone) of their critically acclaimed debut THE BIG COME UP and their follow up full length THICKFREAKNESS, with a heavier take on ‘Have Love Will Travel’
from the latter release and an alternate, but equally cool, version of ‘Heavy Soul’ from the former.
[and don’t you just LOVE that bands are releasing e.p.s again, a further sign of the disintegrating influence of major label philosophy, much of which is based on god-knows-what, on independent music.]
The Black Keys love their music and aren’t afraid to show it. Otherwise it would be damn near impossible in these self-conscious times to deliver songs like ‘Have Love Will Travel’ and the Stooges’ ‘No Fun’ with the sincerity that’s packed into every ounce of this little black cd.
Purists may have less complimentary things to say about the blues credentials of these two Akron-ites,(Akronians?) but white folk going anywhere near anything bluesy have always gotten an earful of criticism and with these two it should be no different.
Like the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The Black Keys are foremost a rock band with roots in blues, garage, punk, all the things that make good rock n roll when kids get together in the basement and start playing loud music (in both sound and spirit, any of these tracks would be right at home on one of the Nuggets compilations.)
They’re as funky as they are bluesy, as Detroit as they are Mississippi Delta (you can check out the cover of She Said, She Said on TBCU to hear this). At their strongest, like on “Have Love Will Travel”, they riff on the spirit pf the blues instead of the mannerisms with an instinctive understanding of what makes music vital when stripped of its excess, rather than attempt to recreate some period in music history.
They’re The Black Keys, they’re from Ohio, and they’re funky as hell.
And if I was a bass player from the Midwest, I’d be starting to get a little nervous right about now. |