#426 The Black Keys - El Camino

The Black Keys are always worth hearing.

These guys haven't quite made the same album again and again, but their growth has been about as glacially slow as humanly, musically possible. This is their seventh album. Seventh! And while the soulful sheen of Brothers stands apart from the Danger Mouse-dusted Attack and Release, only just barely.

Here the leap is bigger, the Keys' signature sinewey grit is rounded with bass, doubled guitars, organs and Radioheady electronics, and honest to god Stonesey gospel backing. It's all well-composed, well-balanced, downrich rich compared to their usual slimjim snap.

But most importantly, the band retains their songwriting knack for riffs, bridges, and hooks. Consider two of the album's standout tracks. Nova Baby is stripped to the basics in 4/4 bass, bass-snare-bass-snare stomp on the choruses, a soaring vocal line, and the usual killer ending riff and it all just works, sounding like a cover of a great lost early Weezer song.

Then there's centerpiece Little Black Submarines, which is all the most effective because of the structural fakeout it pulls. It starts off sounding like a White Stripes cover of Stairway to Heaven, copping White's blues-copping sneer and Zeppelin's exact progression, making this the most overrated-sounding song* of all time. But then it kicks into a shredding solo riff that bests Stairway's turning point, bending its original line into overdrive, blasts the kickin riff into overdrive, solo part 2 and we're out in 4:11. Can we start playing this song instead of Stairway to Heaven at the top of classic rock countdowns**? It does all the same things just as well in half the time.

This album represents kind of an incredible, is un-dramatic, transition for the band: the move from gritty garage to legitimately shimmering, swaggering glam is pulled off seamlessly. Or at very least the transition from the garage-via-90's to glam-via-90s. There's nothing truly new here, but the whole thing just hangs together, cementing The Black Key' status as a brilliant band made of nearly brilliant musicians who make nearly brilliant songs 4.5/5

You might like this if: you like all those crunchy guitar songs you've been hearing on all those commercials, but wish somebody would come along and glam em up a bit.

* Is there any non-Christmas song whose popularity is more fueled by nostalgia than Stairway to Heaven?

** I came across this list in my research. Is it or is it not the shittiest Greatest Rock Song list you've ever seen? If you can find a worse one I owe you a dollar.