I’d have left the Black Key’s new album at the two sentence thrashing I’d given it a couple of weeks ago but I woke up Wednesday to find it at the top of Billboard charts so let’s explain just a little more why this divorce album doesn’t work and Coldplay’s one does work, at least a little better. Neither Turn Blue nor Ghost Stories will make my best of 2014, but the latter isn’t an unmitigated disaster.
The difference is: Dan Auerbach is angry and brooding and Chris Martin is sad and brooding and angry and angry and brooding is just ill tempered and ill tempo’d. Plus, if you’re gonna have a duo and play the blues, play the damn blues. Instead we get sonic tweedle twaddle thanks to Danger Mouse who, after his own atrocious Broken Bells album, After The Disco, sets out to remake the Black Keys in his own image.
If I cared about the album I’d be pissed and how but except for the last song, the awesome kiss off “Gotta Get Away”, and the final two minutes of the first one, none of this is worth paying too much attention to. Is it worth lining up the usual suspects, giving this tedious and badly written album four and four and a halkf stars while claiming it is their best work to date, which it clearly is nothing of the sort?
At least, if you are gonna be a blues duo how about being a SPARE BLUES DUO: why the over doing of sounds. If you are a guitar and drums band be one and if you don’t want to be one write better songs.
After listening to this damn thing more times than I wanted to in my worst nightmare, I guess it isn’t… no, it is terrible. I guess I like Dan’s falsetto here and there and Patrick is a good drummer but it is a bad album which just plain doesn’t add up and any particular time. Well played and deeply felt, it is over arranged and enervating.
Grade: C-
