Black Keys – Attack And Release

When you think about it, the potentially unholy union of Danger Mouse (the producer/auteur/masher-upper behind the Beatles/Jay-Z two-car pileup The Grey Album, and one half of Gnarls Barkley) and Akron’s finest swamp-blues twosome the Black Keys isn’t such a bad idea.

The Keys and Danger Mouse are both avid conceptualizers. The duo loves the idea of blues-rock as much as the thing of it, Danger Mouse seems to prize incongruity above all, and there’s hardly an ounce of sincerity between them, though this isn’t necessarily a handicap. Attack And Release is a canny approximation of a blues album, the sort of thing made by white guys from the midwest who aren’t the White Stripes even though they often sound like they might as well be. It’s a hoot.

The Black Keys’ fifth album and first made in a proper studio, Attack And Release is another triumph of fuzz, fat-bottomed bass, portentous and often indecipherable lyrics about something or other, and riotous, up-from-the-ooze sludge-rock. Danger Mouse hasn’t done much to alter the Keys’ standard formula, though he has made it vaguer and creepier, adding layers of vaporous effects that update the Keys’ sound from 1972 to somewhere in the early ’00s.

They dabble in country (there’s the slow-burning duet with bluegrass singer Jessica Lea Mayfield on “Things Ain’t Like They Used To Be”, and the woozy, weird, banjo-fied “Psychotic Girl”) and slow-creep psychedelia. But in the end, anything that detracts from the Keys’ trademarked full-frontal sonic assaults (like the ode-to-mindless-riffage “Strange Times”) only seems to get in the way.