Rating My CD's: This Isn't Supposed to Be Here.

18. The Black Keys -- Brothers

It's September. I'm in the damn E's.

Back in January, when I conceived this,  I hoped that I would have knocked out the first part of this plan by the end of the year. I should be elbow deep in the Rolling Stones by now, not struggling to come up with things to say about Echo and the Bunnymen. I shouldn't be promising reviews to my three readers. I should be delivering them.

Remember my one-word review of Back in Black? Good times.

So the last thing I need at this point, with my momentum flagging, is to double back into the B's just because I happen to have bought another Black Keys disc. Hell, I shouldn't be buying another Black Keys disc until I've finished cataloguing all the stuff I already have, sitting patiently, alphabetically by genre, waiting for me to tell all of you whether I like it or Like It like it.

Yet my office? A shambles.

I blame Album-a-Week, who most insidiously reviewed Brothers after I failed to resist the temptation to pick it up for $10 at Target (I'm not made of stone). This caused me to listen to it, repeatedly, and delight it its soulful blues stylings as I painted my sun room and as I drove to work, activities for which blues stylings were practically invented, or would have been if white people had invented the blues, which they may have done, if 17th-century "mountebank songs" can be considered the first blues. So there's that.

You see, as critics, we're supposed to prize authenticity. So blues is supposed to mean more and be better if it comes from a legitimately repressed voice. Auerbach and Carney, two more honkeys what have absconded with the blues, hardly qualify. In fact, they come damn near deserving that backhanded insult that Iggy Pop tossed at 60's bloosboys like Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield:

What I noticed about thes black guys was that their music was like honey off their fingers. Real childlike and charming in its simplicity. It was just as very natural mode of expression and life-style. They were drunk all the time and it was all sexy-sexy and dudey-dudey, and it was just a bunch of guys that didn't want to work and who played good. I realized that these guys were way over my head, and that what they were doing was so natural to them that it was reidiculous for me to make a studious copy of it, which is what most white blues bands did.

Leaving aside the notion of whether one can play guitar real good without working at it, would we really wish to limit the blues as nothing more than a display of natural blackness? Would we desire to ignore the vast and profound influence that country and folk music had on the blues? Iggy may have had a point back in 1969, but we've been around the block a bit since then.  The blues have gone one way or another, but has had many a dirty hand on it.

Brothers knows all about sounding dirty. I doubt very much that critics and audience will both alight on a record this year as perfectly filthy-sounding as this one. The drums sound wet and soft, the guitars brassy and bent, and the vocals miles away down by the crossroads. The lyrics are the same old, same old: hi-fi bone boxes, a tortured mind and a sharp blade, and blood in a woman's eye. If it doesn't sound quite like Muddy Waters, that's because the Black Keys have carved out their own sound, just as true. Mudddy's words don't pay our bills.

Grade: LL