Last Ones Standing
On their twelfth studio album, The Black Keys sound revitalized... but is there still a market for their brand of blues-rock? Plus: Dusty grooves from Charley Crockett.
The Black Keys - Ohio Players
When the dust settles on 2024, The Black Keys’ Ohio Players may be remembered as one of the year’s watershed releases— though not necessarily for reasons the Keys might have hoped for.
The record’s ignoble status is no reflection of its quality. Far from being a tepid or disappointing affair, Ohio Players finds The Black Keys sounding more vital and creative than they have in years. Following a few albums that offered diminishing returns— including 2022’s Dropout Boogie, a perfunctory set that suggested the Akon duo was running out of ideas— the new album is colorful and kinetic, a record that taps new collaborators to both freshen and focus the Keys’ signature blues-rock swagger.
Sadly, the record’s creative achievement has not yielded commercial success. An insightful post from my friend Stephen Thomas Erlewine notes that Ohio Players is the first Black Keys album in 18 years not to crack the Billboard Top 20, slipping out of the Top 200 a handful of weeks after its release. More embarrassingly still, the band scuttled a full-scale arena tour, anemic ticket sales forcing them to reconvene in much smaller venues. As Erlewine writes, “there's no disguising the fact that downscaling to theaters is humiliating for a band that's called arenas home for over a decade.”
This seemingly abrupt downturn in fortunes feels epochal— not just for The Black Keys, but for blues- and R&B-based rock music in general. Outlasting their color-coordinated foils in The White Stripes, the duo of guitarist Dan Auberback and drummer Patrick Carney have long seemed like the last of their kind, a guitar-wielding band still able to generate both critical acclaim and mainstream interest. Just a little over a decade ago, “Lonely Boy” proved that this kind of music maintained broad appeal, and was capable of at least some level of pop culture ubiquity. In 2011, the band played SNL on two different occasions within the same calendar year.
Erlewine posits that the diminished status of The Black Keys is partly due to classic rock’s shrinking audience, and partly due to the band reaching middle age. “The wear and tear they bear aren't battle scars, it's heavy mileage,” he suggests. “At some point, the vehicle is bound to slow down.”
Maybe so, but perhaps the cruelest irony here is that the largely-overlooked Ohio Players evinces a band that still has plenty of rev in its engine. It’s certainly the best of the albums The Black Keys have made since their extended hiatus, a run of albums that began with the appealingly lean and limber Let’s Rock but quickly came to feel like more-of-the-same. Ohio Players is genuinely surprising, a record that plays to the band’s strengths with a renewed sense of energy and imagination— it’s the best thing they’ve made since the twin peaks of Brothers and El Camino.
Part of the album’s allure is that it’s self-styled as a party album. Auberbach and Carney are both insatiable collectors of vinyl, and they love to unwind by spinning classic singles and unearthed gems. Ohio Players replicates that same crate-digging spirit, each song sounding like it could be a lost 45 from a regional record label, the cumulative effect resembling a cheerful jukebox of vintage rock, R&B, blues, and soul.
Indeed, if there is anything that distinguishes their post-Brothers work from early hits like Rubber Factory, it’s that classic soul now feels just as foundational to their music as the blues. These days, they can slide an old-school cover into their tracklist and it’s truly hard to tell it apart from the originals, as is the case with their slow-and-sensual reading of William Bell’s “I Forgot to Be Your Lover”— a slinky album highlight. Auerbach’s anguished singing makes it one of the most compelling slow jams in the Black Keys catalog, though it’s nearly equaled by “On the Game,” a majestic original.
The latter bears a co-write from Oasis’ Liam Gallagher, one of a few collaborators roped into the Keys’ inner circle to help tighten up their songcraft. It’s an effort that pays off handsomely: Not only is every song here taut, tuneful, and direct, but they introduce some new textural elements to the Keys’ meat-and-and-potatoes aesthetic. A handful of Beck team-ups recall the loose, ragged spirit of Odelay, while production from Dan the Automator turns “Beautiful People (Stay High)” into a horn-drenched, disco-ready delight.
In fact, the Keys incorporate hip-hop into their vintage-jukebox aesthetic like never before— or at least not since their overlooked Blackroc side project. Both “Candy and Her Friends” and “Paper Crown” feature guest verses from some fairly anonymous rappers, and while the bars themselves are pedestrian, they add further texture to the album’s celebratory milieu. These verses also highlight an undervalued part of the Black Keys’ appeal: their penchant for goofiness.
Even more representative of the album’s vibe is a run of crowd-pleasing rockers tricked out with multi-tracked woo-hoo vocals and the steady pound of Carney’s drums— including a few songs that rival “Lonely Boy” for sheer, addictive energy. “Only Love Matters” and “Don’t Let Me Go” are perfect marriages of the band’s rugged blues aesthetic and their pure pop instincts, while “Every Time You Leave” closes the album with rip-roaring guitar from Auerbach.
Lyrically, The Black Keys have always been best when reclaiming the terse tropes of the blues, whether in murder ballads or love-gone-wrong laments. Bringing some fresh blood into their songwriting process only accentuates their gifts for economy and precision, as on the sadsack opener “This is Nowhere”: “Wanna disappear in the atmosphere for a million years/ No discount beers, no alligator tears/ Just the sound of the wind blowing past my ears.”
Even when the sentiments are glum, Auerbach and Carney consistently sound like they’re having fun. With Ohio Players, they’ve succeeded at making the after-hours party record they imagined. It’s just a shame more people aren’t showing up for it.
My rating: 7.5 out of 10
Charley Crockett- $10 Cowboy
The Black Keys aren’t the only ones who sound like men out of time, creating rich and vibrant new music grounded in the sounds of vintage soul. On a terrific new record called $10 Cowboy, Texas singer Charley Crockett offers a treasury of classic American tales, spanning lovers, losers, and leavers from the backpages of our shared mythology. On this album more than ever, his hardscrabble country sound is punched up with dusty desert rhythms.
Crockett has long been regarded as one of the hardest-working men in the Americana scene, releasing a celebrated run of albums that draw equally from jukebox blues and outlaw country. A storyteller through and through— his album The Valley was inspired by a diagnosis of congenital heart disease, while The Man from Waco sketched a loose, Red Headed Stranger-styled renegade Western— Crockett somehow seems to be at one with a particular strain of mythic Americana. It might be relevant to note that he penned a song for Martin Scorsese’s historical epic Killers of the Flower Moon; that he alleges to be the distant relative of Davey Crockett.
$10 Cowboy isn’t a grand epic so much as an anthology of short stories and tall tales— and while they are rooted in archetypes, they never feel like historic reenactments. “America” is a working-class lament that could be as old as the frontier, as contemporary as the morning headlines. Over a punchy R&B rhythm, Crockett sings: “America, I wonder/ If you remember me/ America, you promised/ And I’ve been waiting patiently.”
Most songs are less explicitly sociopolitical, yet Crockett excels at inhabiting the role of the downtrodden and the put-upon. The titles themselves tell a tale: Crockett’s characters are beset by “Hard Luck & Circumstances,” and while they’re “Good at Losing,” they “Ain’t Done Losing Yet.” “Spade” is a woebegone tale of gambling and murder. There is solace in finding a mythic “City of Roses”— “you just keep a-rollin’ East”— while “Lead the Way” holds out faith that the long and winding road eventually leads to rest.
Crockett brings singular phrasing to every song, and while his crack studio band still supplies plenty of pedal steel and twang, $10 Cowboy is equally indebted to muscular grooves and sumptuous soul. It’s another Charley Crockett album that sounds like it could be a lost classic— and its borderless spirit holds timeless appeal.
My rating: 7.5 out of 10