The home of The Black Keys is a broke-down palace built around the muddy waters of rhythm and blues, and as a matter of tradition, the band knows it can’t live there alone.
The yellowed pages of the genre are haunted by old souls and the inevitable comparisons that come with stepping in dirtied tracks; it takes a deep and unique kind of hurt to shout them out as your own. Drummer Patrick Carney and singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach do a fine job of it on “Thickfreakness,” however, scarring over their wounds with agitated guitars, deep pocket drumming and swollen vocals. It’s a triple-shot of worry, fixed on nothing but healing through the sound of itself.
So what, exactly, is the fuss these cats from Akron, Ohio are raising that’s led them to believe they can stake out a piece of the Delta for themselves? For starters, they knock the evolution trick down cold on their first pass, handling the new material with a gruff maturity that defies their young age. Though it still chugs through the “medium fidelity” screen of Carney’s basement tape production, their sound has grown thicker and more resilient since 2002’s “The Big Come-Up,” and it’s not just the fuzz-box that’s doing the talking – the strength is in the songs.
The skip-shot riffing on “Set You Free” sets the table for the album’s graceful mood swings; the smooth shifts in tempo throughout are ushered in by Carney’s uptight and quite alright time-keeping. And before Auerbach gets the chance to broil his solo on “Hard Row” in a wave of feedback, the duo has already dropped the bottom out of the song’s chorus, turning the boogie-romp into an eclipsing duet between a singer and his guitar.
“Thickfreakness” is full of such snapback emotions, and songs like “If You See Me” motion to split the difference between them, emphasizing the terse dialogue between Auerbach’s slurred leads and Carney’s anxious backbeat. The songs here – and the small moments in them that speak to their wholes – are still sad and blue, just deeper at times, and refreshingly unafraid to sound like they’re having a hell of a time.
It’s progression without much of an option – if you’ve got the hurt in you, there’s a time and a place where it’s going to have to come out. But there’s a history lesson here as well, and rather than hide their influences in thinly veiled phrasings, the duo draw a roadmap in the dust they kick up: through the overgrown shuffle of Junior Kimbrough’s “Everywhere I Go” to the unapologetic strong arm that is Richard Berry’s quest for love (“Have Love Will Travel”), Carney and Auerbach are as comfortable making room in other people’s shoes as they are walking in their own.
Which leads back to Kimbrough. It’s the shuffle they dig out of his song, that soul-searching groove that went and lost its cool somewhere down the line that’s being rediscovered all over “Thickfreakness.” With all due respect, Carney and Auerbach aren’t content to wail away behind the 12-bars of the blues forever. They’re hell-bent on shaking the mold around and do – loudly, keeping in their conscious mind the notion that you can uproot the boy but never take away his home. In other words, the familiar sound of the blues is always just a half step and heartbreak away.
With decades of roots to mind and 38 minutes of their own ground to forge, The Black Keys high-step on the countrified, finger-picked plains of “Hurt Like Mine” down through to “I Cry Alone,” something of a Delta lullaby for the brokenhearted. Crawling like a heavy whisper, it tucks the album away with a parting shot of bittersweet truth: “One day, one day I let her go / It hurt, it hurt so you’ll never know / One day I had to let her go, it hurt bad you cannot know, one day … I let her go.” And you thought you were the only one.
The old blues and new school of “Thickfreakness” fight to a well-deserved draw. It’s the cross-pollination of ideas and instinct that have earned Carney and Auerbach the right to play long into the night and, if they so choose, straight on ’til morning.
