Their first full-length album since 2011’s El Camino, The Black Keys offer up psychedelic grooves on their new release Turn Blue. The album, which is due for a May 13th release, is now streaming for free, through iTunes First Play for this week only. We had a chance to sit down and listen to the record, and were certainly pleased with the result.
The album, which was co-produced by Danger Mouse, is described as a “headphone record.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, frontman Dan Auerbach says that the band decided to delve into more complex songwriting. Once the album’s seven-minute-long opener, “Weight of Love,” was penned, Auerbach realized they would be fine abandoning their typical style for more erudite music.
Lost are those three-minute swampy-sexy blues-rock numbers that have come to define The Black Keys. Instead, showing their maturity, The Black Keys have incorporated their bluesy style into loftier, psychedelic music. The album has an ethereal quality, each tune floating over a slowed-down backbeat and cosmic synthesizer effects. This is especially abundant on the title track, a slow, trippy jam.
The tempo picks up for the next track, “Fever,” showcasing Auerbach’s iconic vocals over a minimalistic bass-and-drums backdrop. An added synthesizer melody (a catchy one, to boot) over the chorus injects the song with a dance-floor energy. The influence of Danger Mouse is readily apparent on this song, with a bright synth melody that allows for a transition into a yearning bridge section. Dig it:
The third and final single released from the album is “Bullet In The Brain,” a longing groove with slow, drawn-out vocals laid over pounding guitar chords and sweeping synthesizers. The tune sounds like a Guess Who track from the late-1960’s, speaking to the psychedelic style of Turn Blue. This segues seamlessly into “It’s Up To You Now,” a standard-sounding Black Keys track with that Danger Mouse synthesizer spin. The song starts out rather traditionally, until a brief explosion-type effect drops the tune into a slower tempo. With a soaring guitar solo featuring a tantalizing guitar tone effect, this musical shift certainly defines this blues-rocky tune.
The final few tracks follow the floating-trippy ethos of Turn Blue, using treble-end guitar and synth melodies, with drawn-out vocal lines, to achieve a surreal sense about it. The songs certainly serve their purpose, to this end, but I couldn’t help feeling like I was waiting for something to happen. Black Keys music typically has this distorted, swampiness to them, but the songs on Turn Blue seems to have abandoned that quality. We still get those yearning Auerbach vocals, but, they’re set to softer progressions and electronically-inspired synthesizers. There’s no rock and roll.
It’s a good album, and certainly worth a listen. It’s nice that the band is taking new directions with their music, but I don’t think they’ve quite found that balance between the longer ballad-type compositions and that grittiness that has come to define The Black Keys. It’s good music, sure, but the fans want good Black Keys music.
Still, Turn Blue is some high quality music, and is certainly not to be overlooked as one of the great releases of 2014.
-David Melamed (@DMelamz)