THE BLACK KEYS - Attack & Release - 2008 - Album review

THE BLACK KEYS – Attack & Release – 2008 – Album review
HIGHLIGHTS: All You Ever Wanted – I Got Mine – Psychotic Girl – Remember When (Side A) - Same Old Thing
SOUNDBITE: "I'll be a black bird darlin/ Hanging on your telephone wire/ Flap my wings over you/ And set your heart afire"
RATING: 5/5
With the exception of riff-beast Your Touch, the Black Keys’ last album Magic Potion was a lacklustre collection of dirges suggesting that the ideas had run out and that they'd taken a wrong turn at the blues crossroads into a musical dead-end. Happily, Attack & Release doesn’t so much find them reversing back out of this cul-de-sac as piling straight on through the creative blockage and coming out triumphantly on the other side. Originally intended as a collaboration with the late Ike Turner, the project was also to involve Dangermouse as producer and indeed it was he who produced this. Anyone expecting loads of programmed beats and samples can put that notion to bed as Dangermouse seems to have taken pains to largely preserve the Keys’ signature rawness. That said, everything about this LP is subtler and more sophisticated than previous outings from the instrumental arrangements, to the melodies to the extent that it requires a few listens to warm too – but warm to it you will. Yeah – it’s a bit of a grower. First track All You Ever Wanted is a Mark Lanegan-esque piece of dreamy blues melancholia about lost love - "You see him out your window/ And even when you close the blinds/ Cause all you ever wanted/ Was someone to treat you nice and kind". Luckily it's one of the more instantly accessible numbers and provides an insight into other surprises to come when it morphs into a massive organ and guitar wig-out at the end. I Got Mine is classic Black Keys with Dan Auerbach managing to sound both tortured and demonic over a fat blues lick even bigger than the beard he’s sporting on the album cover as he belts out lyrics in the classic Delta mould like "I was a movin man/ In my younger Days/ But I've grown out/ Of my ramblin ways". And if you thought the earlier use of an organ was a bit of a departure, wait until the Cajun banjo hits you on the swampy groove of Psychotic Girl or the way a leaf is taken out of Wolfmother’s book with the piccolo at the start of album highlight Same Old Thing which, could in fact be a mellower, groovier Wolfmother number were it not for Auerbach’s classic blues howl. The album’s centrepiece Remember When is a two parter. Part A is a beautiful slow-burning blues ballad with layers of strings and organs to augment the guitar: Part B is a chugging fuzz-rock onslaught. I’m still not keen on first single Strange Times but everything else on the LP more than makes up for it, though at a lightweight thirty-nine minutes it’s all over way to soon.
Out now.
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