This is an album you can love. The Black Keys have occasionally felt like an NME band: musically weak, sunglasses indoors, happy to play to a crowd of twenty-five. However, Turn Blue feels like real music, like something you could reminisce to in your dotage. The problem is that Arctic Monkeys blew the roof off rock and roll this summer with AM, and it will now forever be nigh on impossible for guitar swindling bands of the ‘10s to match up. To The Black Keys’ credit, the opening three tracks of Turn Blue manage to resuscitate the in-the-room feel of a Hendrix album: there are accidental twitches of imperfection, subtle fault-lines in his voice.
The guitar solos feel spontaneous (a rarity), the deep bass is a welcome heaviness in the age of ukuleles, and the xylophone fl utters are suitably experimental. Even easy plodders like the second track ‘In Time’ have a real thud-in-the-stomach, a disturbing funk. Listen to either this second song
or ‘10 Lovers’ and sit still – I dare you. Perhaps Turn Blue’s greatest asset is its sheer confidence. There’s a pirate’s nonchalance all the way through, and you feel brilliantly talked-down to. The fi rst three songs demonstrate that you don’t need ‘Lonely Boy’ pace and ‘Gold On The Ceiling’ riff s to get your dance on; the ‘less is more’ cliché is really appropriate here. The bass line to ‘10 Lovers’ – despite being washed away by the irritating synth melody – is absolutely amazing.It suffers from ‘Foster The People Syndrome’, a terrible disease – clean and excellent bass lines are vomited-on by idiotic major chords or patronising synth riffs (as a reference, listen to Foster The People’s ‘Best Friend’ from their new album Supermodel, and compare the dire chorus with the excellent breakdown).
Yet, somehow, it unexpectedly, yet brilliantly works. The lyrics are fairly plain, and obviously derivative. Title track ‘Turn Blue’ features lines like, “when the music is done and all the lights are low” that lack originality, and make the duo feel more like an Arctic Monkeys tribute than ever. ‘‘Bullet in The Brain’ should be a killer, but the lyrics, ironically along with the title lack sophistication. But so what? You don’t sing along to this album: you dance around in your pants to it.
