Thickfreakness

You’d be forgiven for approaching them with suspicion (two musicians… who play drums and electric blues guitar… from the American Midwest… with a colour in their name? I’ve got one already) but Akron, Ohio duo The Black Keys couldn’t be less like The White Stripes if they were D12 Present The Polyphonic Spree Experience, starring 50 Cent in his Broadway debut as Tim DeLaughter.

It’s probably telling that The Black Keys are on newish blues-revivalist imprint Fat Possum – who resurrected such mid-to-late-20th-century Mississippi-delta bluesmen as Junior Kimbrough and James ‘T-Model’ Ford, and whose raison d’etre is pretty much, as a journalist put it, “to record the music before everybody dies” – as distinct from being on some new-fangled Young Person’s Label, like, say, XL (The White Stripes) or Domino (The Kills). With its muffled, “mono”-style production quality, uniformity of tempo and song structure and bourbon-scratched vocals submerged good and low – just like daddy used to do – Thickfreakness is all about paying homage and not at all about offering a new vision of how blues can be the backbone of music that is unapologetically modern.

So instead of the one-off lust-and-hatred bloodbaths of The Kills or we get an album that sounds alarmingly like Cream-era Clapton. It’s by no means a poor or unlistenable album, but mercy… Son House, I reckon, never meant it to be this way.