It behooves us to take 90 seconds here and figure out how this band got so popular and enduring. The Black Keys were born in the teeth of the early-aughts "Rock Is Back!" movement, wherein a cadre of uncouth garage-y bands all named The ______s saved us from the terrorists and/or the Backstreet Boys. Eventual result: deserved ignominy (the Vines), undeserved ignominy (the Hives), bewildered near-implosion (the Strokes), and bewildering total implosion (the White Stripes). The years have not been kind.
You didn't figure the Keys as sole survivors and mainstream lifers when The Big Come Up emerged in 2002 and offered a walking rockist orgasm: two gawky white dudes from Akron, Ohio, drums and surly guitar and burning-oatmeal-mouthed yawps of not terribly articulate romantic frustration, all powering cartoonishly virile garage-blues jams of prison-phone-call fidelity and sentiment. Ridiculous and kind of awesome. (This assumes racially uneasy cultural appropriation is no longer an issue for you, but if so, feel free to evoke the Blueshammer scene in the Ghost World movie and the hell with it.)
And so. They named their second album Thickfreakness; they recorded their third album in an abandoned tire factory and named it Rubber Factory. For a while there, they always did confoundingly well in critics' polls, as though they were every single rock scribe's seventh-favorite band. They evolved incredibly slowly-- you can enjoy their early work tremendously and never retain five consecutive seconds of it beyond their cover of "Have Love Will Travel". Danger Mouse got involved as a producer, to the immediately evident benefit of no one. Coupla daffy side projects in there somewhere. (BlakRoc!) Ah yes, and they got their music in a shitload of ads, from Victoria's Secret to Zales to American Express to Subaru, like just so much capitalism, to the extent that they went on The Colbert Report with Vampire Weekend and clowned themselves about it.
By which time they'd broken through. Last year's Brothers, their sixth album, had wit and pop charm and a minor hit in "Tighten Up" (and unremitting bloat, but ah), and thus came the Spin cover, the Saturday Night Live appearances, the Grammys. And now we greet El Camino, their best and (not coincidentally) goofiest album, a veritable frat-worthy "Pimp 'n' Ho" party in which T. Rex has somehow been tricked into serving as house band. The riffs are glam-nasty, the lyrics sublimely knuckleheaded, the basslines nimble and bombastic, the mood frivolous and fun and unabashedly corny. It's way shorter than Brothers, too. Sweet cars, witchy women, "Gold on the Ceiling." A bizarre attempt to philosophically combine the videos for "Sabotage" and "Legs". The fine line between a tricked-out GTO and "GTFO."
Danger Mouse figured it out, for one thing. He unnecessarily arted up 2008's Attack & Release (plus the hit off Brothers), and his angelic-choir/space-glockenspiel Super Mario Galaxy fantasias still distract-- everything's a goddamn spaghetti western with this guy. But Camino's sonic frills are mercifully few, content to stick your head right in Patrick Carney's bass drum as he stomps through the caveman jam "Hell of a Season" with virtuosic anti-virtuosity, or revel in the machine-gun surge of Dan Auerbach's gong-banging guitar on surging opener "Lonely Boy". It's a shame Rock Band is no longer a thing. "Gold on the Ceiling" is just filthy, like George Thorogood scoring porn, all raunchy organ and licentious handclaps and chorus help from ladies attempting to sound like the sorts of ladies Steely Dan loved to write songs about. "I wanna buy some time/ But don't have a dime," goes the raucous one called "Money Maker". Better cash some Subaru checks.
The lyrics! The lyrics are hilarious. Great advice, via Brothers: "Well, you can watch her strut/ But keep your mouth shut." God bless Auerbach for ignoring it, and, amid the keening/crunching stomp of "Run Right Back", dropping some serious knowledge: "Well she's a special thing/ She doesn't read too much, oh/ But there's no doubt/ She's written about." Which is really just a prelude to the miraculous five-word sequence that is "Finest exterior/ She's so superior," which, Jesus. Show me the CARFAX, Romeo. Your emotional climax is "Little Black Submarines", which starts acoustic and pathos-ridden: "A broken heart is blind," goes the biologically suspect refrain. But then, hosanna, the distortion kicks in, the riff from "Mary Jane's Last Dance" is lifted wholesale, and suddenly we are rocking, Carney and Auerbach in call-and-response/attack-and-release napalm mode, back in the rubber factory in spirit if not tax bracket.
Yes, well. Consider El Camino the aural equivalent of one of those Chrysler "Imported from Detroit" ads where a $47,000 car slowly rolls through one of the most devastated cities in America, a sign for 8 Mile Road glimpsed through tinted windows: the finest in luxury grit. Seedy, escapist camp, crass but expert, so expert. That they're the true victors of the 2000s garage explosion is no shock at all. Rock came back. Commerce never left.
