Tag Archives: garage rock

Review: The Black Keys – “El Camino”

Jesus, it's like it's like they had a 'Complete Idiot's Guide to Hipster Appeal' on their night stand.

The Black Keys’ seventh album warrants quite a bit of reflection on their career, and not just in the fact that this band has existed for all of ten years now and have released as many albums as they have, but how they’ve grown in this environment. Most notably, the Black Keys now have one more album on their oft-compared blues-punk, garage rock contemporaries, the White Stripes, who have broken up and left on a note of high concept art. The Black Keys, meanwhile, have stayed steadfast in their ways of producing records chock full of rough-edged juke and blues that is so traditionalist (even among the distortion and feedback), that even the keep-it-simple style the Stripes have become synonymous with looks complicated. But, much like the Stripes, they couldn’t go on making the same records forever, and upon achieving major label status (and releasing the terrific and ambitious, but still traditional, Magic Potion), they decided to make a giant leap forward and drop the true blues style for a poppier, yet somehow hazier sound, and pick up Danger Mouse as producer for Potion‘s follow up, Attack and Release. And with a bigger sound and a few trophies under their belt (and, yes, like Jack White, a move to Tennessee), the Black Keys embark on the follow up to their wildly successful album, Brothers.

And it’s from there that we tell the rest of our story (after the jump).

Continue reading