The Black Keys are Back. And Presumably, Still Black.

Under the Radar:

Each song is its own piece of soulful groove. Hurling forward at full-throttle, this is The Black Keys' most direct and consistent album yet. With the new audience the two have garnered from 2010's Brothers, expect to hear these songs on everything from car commercials to the nearly extinct rock radio. There isn't a bad song in the bunch, nor a moment to relax until you've ingested El Camino in full.

That sounds perfect, and indeed, exactly like what the album was promised: a full-on, rocked out stack of Clash-meets-Cramps stew. Only problem, and this is minor, is the album cover:

That is not an El Camino. That is a minivan (a '91 Dodge Grand Caravan, unless I miss my guess). And showing a picture of a minivan and deliberately mislabeling it an El Camino is about as funny as the generic labelling that accompanied Brothers. Which is to say, it's not all that funny at all.

Unless of course, it's some kind of trash-culture riff on how an El Camino is really just a glorified mom-mobile. In which case, they couldn't be more wrong. I like the look of the picture, and I like the lettering. But  I don't see how having an actual El Camino would not have made a better picture.

Black Keys, Danger Mouse Working Together

They worked together before, on Attack & Release, and according to Spin, on Brothers as well.  So I don't know why Under the Radar thinks this is news. But a record in the vein of the Clash & the Cramps sounds wicked tasty.

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.

Rating My CD's: Things Ain't Like They Used to Be, They're More So

7. The Black Keys -- Attack & Release

In 1970, under the auspices of reviewing Fun House by the Stooges, Lester Bangs emitted a prophecy that I have quoted several times, including somewhere on this very blog:

Personally I believe that real rock n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we will have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

While the argument about whether that "new free music" ever arrived (hip hop doesn't quite seem to qualify) may continue until the seven seals are opened, the rest of the prediction has turned out to be cannily accurate. Every decade rock finds a way to re-invent itself, and every decade it does so by picking up and polishing off an older style and gussying it up with some more reworkings, until its hard to tell what era a band really hails from.