how can the white stripes make blues-rock so fresh when the black keys make it so bloated and dull?

I liked their first album okay, but I was so bored with their live show a couple years back that I left early and haven't listened to them since.

THAT WAS IN WEIRD SCIENCE, NOT BREAKFAST CLUB, FUCK FACE.

it has great artwork though.

Anyway, here's George Smith on the BKs:

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0321/smith.php

http://images.villagevoice.com/issues/0321/smith.jpg

personally I'm gonna stick to Mr. Airplane Man

Chuck Klosterman's take on them:

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0242/klosterman.php

No, no, he also did a brief black-guy impression while stoned in The Breakfast Club.

Black Keys...ten times better in my opinion.

New album may or may not be their best record. It definitely has their best ARTWORK, though. And they do a better version of "Summertime Blues" than John Kerry's old band did. (Though then again so do Rush.)

Ah, wait a minute. So I like things like Lynyrd and Sir Lord Baltimore and much more besides, and I think the Black Keys are pretty much a dull-ass shrug...

And Chuck, I love those bands with the exception of Bad Company.

"I really like on the second track when the guitar quite suddenly gets really loud. It scared the crap out of me the first time I listened to it, and
for that I'll always be grateful"

This is true! Or even OTM! I love that part! But it didn't really get any better than that for me after that song. But I was impressed by the very same thing when I heard it.

Ah, my mistake!

that's what I meant with my Ray Davies comparison. Jack White is working at being a songwriter, and the others are--and this is in no way a value judgment--playing music.

I may be lying but i seem to remember a time when 120 Minutes on MTV played nothing but flat duo jets, horton heat, cramps, and some other band that sounded like the flat duo jets. or it seemed like it anyway. i always wondered if they were trying to start a rootsabilly revolution back then. they were better at trying to establish a new Mission U.K. revolution and a new Soup Dragons revolution. Until grunge of course. which changed the world as we know it. white stripes still sound like pixies+gun club to me, which makes me wonder why i don't listen to them more.

that's black on black crime, yo.

naw, i have to say, when i saw the Keys, i was overcome by how much i dug em, but then, upon getting the album, was totally underwhelmed. it didn't sound a thing like the band i saw. well, ok, very loosely. but it lacked all the stomp and shout they have. just sounded paper thin, except for a track or 2. still haven't heard 'thickfreakness'. it's a shame to me, but i'll go see em again.

btw- Black Lipstick kick much ass around the room.

live, i suspect they could smoke all bands mentioned here

i'm pretty sure i'm in the minority when it comes to liking warlocks on ilm. i know some people think they are rip-off artistes/poseurs or whatever. but i just dig that sound. i can't help it. 3 guitars and two drummers almost always does it for me. i really enjoyed them live too the couple times i saw them in philly. a pale copy of the spacemen? yeah, maybe, but those guitars sound so cool!

By James Hunter
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page C05

For nearly six decades now, in the saga of what fans of all ages and
backgrounds still fondly call rock-and-roll, some band somewhere develops a
reputation for being, uh, special. In the past, the agency of this renown,
however momentary, was often a hit single, a television appearance or news
from overseas. But more recently rock-and-roll has competed not only with
its own mushrooming array of substyles but also with the gigantic hip-hop
universe. Then there are electronic club music, pop American idols and their
major-label recording contracts, not to mention sexy offerings outside music
from movies, videos, computer games, fashion, sports and more. Even for the
rare band with actual reserves of actual allure, the cool traffic has
significantly picked up.

The Black Keys, two Akron, Ohio, natives in their twenties, seem oblivious
to all of this. "Rubber Factory," their new album, capitalizes richly on
whatever it exactly was that caused the rock-and-roll commentariat to adopt
singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney in the first place
as college-dropout makers of new indie-rock blues. The recognition began in
earnest last year, when the Black Keys released "Thickfreakness," their
second album; by the summer of that year, Auerbach and Carney found
themselves opening concerts for none other than Beck, the acclaimed singer
and songwriter who is also a mighty cool-hunter.

As with "Thickfreakness," which the Black Keys recorded in a basement at
home, Auerbach and Carney didn't travel to a fancy studio to face a time
clock ticking expensively away. Once again, they created these 13 songs in
Akron, cooped up for a couple of months with equipment they installed in a
rented former rubber factory. Apparently, given the album's name, the Black
Keys found the experience satisfying.

Star producers, hot English mixers, bass players and Hollywood budgets, the
Black Keys imply, are for other bands.

Independent-minded rock musicians with songs based in traditional U.S. blues
aren't exactly unheard of. Beck himself sometimes has explored the
territory, and more recently Detroit's White Stripes have dressed up the
notion in loud red-and-white variations; when White Stripes honcho Jack
White produced Loretta Lynn earlier this year, moreover, he was keen to
record the Nashville legend fast, cheap, and not in a plush studio. But on
"Rubber Factory" the Black Keys evince their own winning ways with both
indie-rock methods and the blues.

On songs such as "All Hands Against His Own" and "When the Lights Go Out"
Auerbach strings together feverish yet fluid series of riffs, melodies,
rhythms and plain outbursts in ways that put the electric back into
electrification; his idea of the blues is not historical, not pristine.

Doing "The Desperate Man," he and Carney operate out of a slower, spicier
strut treated as a groove that they can slow wherever they like to interject
bracing testimonies of melody, percussion or just pure sound.

Auerbach and Carney proceed as though the scruffiness of indie-rock is not
just a bunch of remote boarding-school biases. For this duo, the tack offers
a way to be creative with a gruffly sung sound akin to the look of junk cars
on the streets of "Wayne's World." Similarly, on "10 a.m. Automatic" -- one
of the year's liveliest tracks -- the Black Keys show how indie-rock blues
can seriously jump, pop and funk around. The track is the high point of an
album unwilling to remain mere ideas, unashamed to make its points with
dispatch, passion and flash. It's the kind of thing that might get a band
called cool.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

ER, UM I dig them both and the Black Keys a little better. White Stripes have too many boring non-songs and the lyrics are mostly worthless, BK's get stuck in a groove(based on 1st two albums here) and Thickfreakness was a bit of a dropoff but they got the goods overall. In fact, I'll see em tonight, if it's not sold out, just to spite this thread.

I think ego is the problem with a lot of these 'duo' bands. Like, I'm not sharing songwriting with ANY motherfucker!! Hence, lack of variety.

But what these bands don't understand is that two or three great songwriters in the same group often make a band special - you get to play favorites on each album, pit them against each other, but most importantly you can enjoy an album the way an album used to sound, without anything 'grating' on you.

That is why Drive By Truckers, The Mendoza Line, and even Silkworm work so well as bands, and all kick ass.

sidenote for Gris Gris fans / curious: Though Greg's solo album (I started a thread on it a while back) is better, the Gris Gris album is also totally weird / great. Listened to it all last night.

xpost-
They don't sound much like ZZ Top to me, though my knowledge of ZZ Top doesn't extend much beyond "Legs" (shameful, I know).

http://o_nate.pitas.com/

shameless, i 'spose. i count myself a big fan - some of the stuff is samey, sure, but damn fun to move to in a room full of others inclined to do the same.

You do understand that many ZZ Top purists HATED "Legs," right?

xp (answer to post about 50 year old bad bar beer guts etc)

The songs that I heard from "Thickfreakness" seemed to lack the tunefulness and catchy melodies of the best tracks on "Rubber Factory", but maybe I just didn't hear the right songs.

Not sure what "darned" thing I said, but I'm curious about this; how do people think their range has broadened? Am I missing something? Or does this just mean that their range has expanded to include both heavy boogie sludge covers of "Summertime Blues" and heavy boogie sludge non-covers of "Summertime Blues"? (Which is not a BAD range; don't get me wrong. Just not an especially rangey one, seems to me.)

xp

Keys=Creedence, minus about 25 of the best rock n' roll songs ever.

The first one had some really great volume and tone fuckarounds, the second one seemed perilously close to the monotonous sludge whatever a lot of people want them to be, the third one broadens in that they're not "just" cribbing from Cream and ZZTop...better hooks, not just whoomp-ass throbbing, but a little bit of croonery and lightness too.

I think the production is best on the first one (there were moments the first time I heard where it nearly scared me, it sounded so hungry and ferocious), but the songs are better on the third one.
The middle one, I don't listen to that much (I actually haven't listened to any of them for a while).

xpost

The Black Keys completely sidestep the excess of most modern blues and 70s blues rock. Their music is informed by Fat Possum artists like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. They have some distinct southern soul, 60s R&B influences with the odd bit of Stones swagger.

Why are people so rockist against blues? There's an awful lot of vitriol in this thread that leads me to believe:

- some of you are suffering from that indie/punk anti-guitar lead purism bullshit
- some of you really don't know what you're talking about.

Blues and blues rock are just like any other genre. 97% of it is bad, and 3% of it is good. Granted, it's hard to find a modern blues act that is worth paying much attention to (but you're bound to strike gold if you follow Fat Possum Records or CaseQuarter.), there are loads of incredibly visceral, important artists in the past who made phenomenal records.

No, Black Keys aren't revolutionizing anything. They don't have the songwriting prowess or the pop influences that Jack White exhibits. But they are at least circumventing the post-SRV, glossy commercial blues crap and trying to do something without the smarmy-garaged up irony that so much blues-influenced indie stuff falls prey to.

No, I don't. Otherwise I wouldn't listen to it. But it would be nice if the lyrics were good too, is all I'm saying.

Nah, Black Keys don't sound anything like hacks covering SRV or other dead bluesmen. Good college try, though.

I prefer their first album to "Thickfreakness," didn't proceed to "Rubber Factory" because I have a great deal of this stuff in my house. The Youlden-era Savoy Brown records being one example. Bakerloo another. Stuff with Chris Farlowe singing and Clem Clempson on guitar. "Rock On" by Humble Pie.