Once upon a time, The Black Keys were an American duo who played fantastic blues and life-affirming soul, using nothing but a wonderful voice full of character, a guitar and a drum kit. Then producer-ofthe- moment Danger Mouse turned up. He produced an uncharacteristically slick album that introduced them to the iTunes world. Now they’re back and Brothers is a very different beast indeed; it’s an offensive assault on creativity and excitement.

Danger Mouse, a man who seems to have the emotional relation to music akin to that of a broken circuit board or a particularly forlorn and dull-coloured cup, has managed to make them embody the sound of flat-lining; creating a cold, dead album that sounds like a lonely iMac’s approximation of music, had the iMac been sat on its lonesome for eternity in some kind of Wall-E scenario. Amazingly, these people made this album on purpose and no one stopped them when they finished and handed over the equivalent of TV static imagined by an unimaginative robot. It’s unlistenable and should make you want to smash everything shiny, slick, white and with the prefix ‘i’, in the hope of exhuming this bland tedium from the modern world. There’s not a noteworthy song on the album, just plodding files (it’d be rude to music in general to call them songs) which would be more interesting if they were broken down into binary code and laid out on paper with all the 1’s and 0’s in their full boring glory. But no, they had to masquerade those 1’s and 0’s under the pretence of music but the dead nothingness of the code behind it shines through. If you’ve even a fleeting interest in The Black Keys, listen to any of their recordings from 2002-08, not this. Never this.

-TC

Tags: American, Brothers, the black keys
Posted in Reviews