#1365 The Black Keys - Turn Blue

This starts off promising: 7-minute opener Weight of Love has power to spare, from its spare accoustic intro to its headphone-ready dangermouse-driven atmospherics to its suite of crushing guitar solos, its another, deeper, heavier level for The Black Keys.

But the rest of the album keeps the same clothes without bothering to keep up the swagger that pulled them off. Things get a bit predictable: take Year in Review where Intro + FirstVerse = FirstChorus so precisely that the motherfucker feels familiar the first time you hear it. The same overcrisp beats, those crooning vocals, those anthemic zero-deviation choruses, that stuffed-full spectrum, we've lost any last vestiges of the garage rock energy that got us excited about these guys circa Thickfreakness.

I praised Danger Mouse's production on Attack and Release, where he had a surprisingly light touch - just tightened up the corners on the basic Black Keys sound. But this ends up sounding like a Broken Bells record half the time, scrubbing the Keys into the Shins. Or maybe one of those forgettable records Beck kept putting out in the early aughts.

There is one place where this latest evolution serves the band: an emphasis on solos. They're longer and more adventurous than ever before, but they're lost in a haze that's anathema to that clean, hard sound that used to define them. The Black Keys've become the kind of band that *needs* solos to punch up their sound - used to be just playing rock and roll was enough 2.5/5