Black Keys’ new album features spacious, sprawling songs

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This article was published 23/10/2014 (4202 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the dying days of 2011, the Black Keys released their seventh studio album, El Camino — the most critically and commercially successful of their career. The Akron, Ohio-bred garage rock duo of Dan Auerbach (guitar/vocals) and Patrick Carney (drums) had wasted no time following up their breakthrough record, 2010’s multiple Grammy-winning Brothers, and the impossibly hooky El Camino was another home run.

So when Auerbach, 35, and Carney, 34, began recording their eighth studio album, this year’s Turn Blue, in January 2013, they were understandably burned out; the nine-leg, 129-show El Camino tour — the duo’s first as an arena headliner — had taken its toll. Still, the pair honoured the session it had booked at Key Club Recording Company in Benton Harbour, Mich., to see what stuck. The songs, Carney says, were sounding a little too safe.

“We were coming right off the road for El Camino and there were a lot of similarities between those songs and he songs on El Camino,” the bespectacled drummer says over the phone. “We wanted to record the whole record during that session, but we realized we needed to take some time off.”

By the time the band reconvened in Los Angeles that July with longtime producer Brian Burton (a.k.a. Danger Mouse, who has been the man behind the board on the last four Black Keys albums), the members had decompressed — but the mood had changed. “Dan was going through a tough time with his divorce, and we were listening to a lot of David Axelrod-esque stuff,” Carney says. “Really dark and spacious. That was the headspace we were in. That was the first time we’d ever embraced that kind of sound and you hear it on songs like In Our Prime and Weight of Love. We really embraced the space. That was an eye-opening thing for us.”

Turn Blue’s spaciousness is arguably its defining feature. Unlike its tight, bright predecessor, the new album sees Auerbach and Carney really stretch out on these songs, many of them sprawling, psychedelic epics. The performances skew more subtle and nuanced — this is a headphone album — but there are still plenty of El Camino-indebted earworms to be had, particularly on songs such as Gotta Get Away, which is an arena anthem if there ever was one.

“This is a polarizing record,” Carney says. “Those who came on for El Camino might not get it. If you’re listening to Brothers, you might get it. That’s the kind of thing I like. We’re proud to make records like that. We could have written El Camino Part 2, but that wouldn’t have been genuine.”

Still, it took the Black Keys a while to get to place where they felt they could take bigger risks. “After our fourth record (2006’s Magic Potion), we’d realized we’d pigeonholed ourselves,” Carney says. “We were a two-piece rock band and we had preconceived notions of what people expected from us. We just started making the records we wanted to make. In any art form, if you’ve got yourself into a position where you’re creating based on other people’s expectations, you’ve f–ed up. We were 27 when we realized what was going on, and that’s when we stopped paying attention to how we’d do things live.”

Up until Magic Potion, the band had been writing and recording only material they could execute as a two-piece, which proved limiting in the studio. A year after that record was released, Danger Mouse recruited the Black Keys to serve as the backing band on an Ike Turner comeback record that was later abandoned upon Turner’s death in late 2007. Burton ended up producing the Black Keys’ 2008 album Attack & Release, marking the first time Auerbach and Carney had enlisted an outside producer — and outside musicians. Suddenly, a whole palette of sounds and textures was available to them. “That was exciting for us,” Carney says. “If Brian hadn’t asked us to do (the Ike Turner project) and if we had been a little younger, I don’t know if things would have turned out the same way. I don’t know if we would have been as open.”

The Black Keys have rounded out their ranks with touring musicians — currently Richard Swift on bass and John Clement Wood on keys/organ/synth — and, for the Turn Blue world tour, which rolls into the MTS Centre on Saturday night, they’re changing up the set list night to night.

It’s been a challenge, Carney says, because “you’re basically guessing what people want to hear,” but it’s been energizing for the band to road-test the songs that have never seen the stage.

“On the first leg, we didn’t play anything off the second or third records,” he says. “We wanted to do our whole catalogue over the tour, but on any given night you’re only playing 21 songs. And there are, like, 11 songs we have to play. So there’s not that much room left.”

Still, he’s been surprised by what resonates with an audience. “We started playing Weight of Love halfway through the first leg,” he says. “We were a little nervous about it because it’s a seven-minute song. But people have been really into it.”

 

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca