One of the blessings of being an American rock group is that you get to develop at your own pace. Unless you’re a pretty boy outfit with nice jackets like The Strokes, there is little danger of the media declaring you the world’s best band on the strength of a half-assed demo. You can release four, five albums without fear of the zeitgeist moving on. In fact, if you are doing things correctly, you may be the best part of a decade into your career before anyone outside the alt. pop hardcore has even heard of you.
This slow-lift off towards arena-scale success was the route pursued by REM, The National, Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie and others. Latest to take the long way around is Akron, Ohio duo The Black Keys who, having spent most of their career traversing the rust-belt in a beat-up van, joined the mega-dome elite with last year’s Brothers (apparently the most licensed LP since Moby’s Play). Not that success didn’t come at a price. Touring ten months a year destroyed drummer Patrick Carney’s marriage, while a breakdown brought on by exhaustion forced him and guitarist Dan Auerbach to cancel a trip to Australia in late 2009. Thus, the omens are less than rosy for the group’s first post-success record, recorded as they struggled to terms with the fact that they’re now sort of a big deal.
Happily, the testing circumstances in which the LP was made have not trickled down to the songwriting. As was the case with Brothers, production is from Danger Mouse and he helps give the music space to breathe, so that the nerdish angst that runs through the writing never becomes overwhelming. You can feel his touch on the unabashedly poppy ‘Money Maker’, the messy, cathartic ‘Hell Of A Season’ and the Exocet-powered ‘Gold On The Ceiling’. Surely the record’s finest moment, though, is the gorgeously thrashy ‘Mind Eraser’, a blues dirge that, as all the Black Keys’ best songs do, suggests a two man Led Zeppelin working through some pretty heavy personal issues.