The Black Keys, El Camino (2011)

Mexico wasn't particularly gentle with me today. A combination of jet lag and the endless struggle that is the language barrier left me a little drained. Sometimes you just don't want it to take 15 minutes to explain that you want to buy credit for your phone, or for it to take the rest of your lunch hour to understand the instructions of the pre-recorded lady at the end of the phone when it comes to actually uploading said credit. Sometimes you just want the simple things to be... well, simple.

So it was, I swear, a coincidence that I decided to listen to El Camino on the walk home. I needed a bit of a pep, but I genuinely didn't expect this album to do it so well for me. I tend to think of The Black Keys as raw, gutteral, angsty blues. And I love them for that. Attack and Release is one of my all-time favorite albums - definitely on the desert island list. I love 2010's release Brothers, and I love Chulahoma. In fact, I'm of the strongly held view that The Black Keys can do no wrong. Because of this, I bought El Camino for my brother before I'd even heard it. I knew it would be a quality album because The Black Keys are and always have been awesome.

Well then. El Camino is in fact a very different album from The Black Keys as we know them. It's still them - it's still dirty bluesy-ish rock, but the emphasis here really is on the 'rock'. This is a rock album with bluesy touches, not vice versa. And I happen to think it's pretty damn good. In rush hour traffic through a capital of 23 million people, the jaunty riff and excitable organs of 'Lonely Boy' set the tone for a renewed energy to deal with this City. The first seven or eight tracks of this album are a strut, a confident, in-your-face, riot of a time. What's not to love about the syncopated hand-claps in 'Dead and Gone'? The album plays with different textures and structures ('Little Black Submarines' is an excellent experiment with a pretty little ballad, bridging into the raw, angrier Black Keys as we know them from previous work) and even though some of the sounds are a bit of a surprise, I think it works. 'Gold on the Ceiling' is like some kind of sugar-coated little jaunt, and in a city where I'm constantly harassed as a "rubia", I couldn't help but smile at the opening lines of 'Money Maker'.

What I love about this album is that it's still distinctly the Black Keys. It's still gnarly guitars and wailing organs and those distinctive vocals. It's just now overlaid with this new energy. It's more polished and less raw, but it's good.

So I put this album on and I walked home and people were still staring and probably shouting rude things at me, but finally I was having an awesome time in my ears with this great band who I love. The Black Keys got me home in a good mood, delivering me safely to my beloved rooftop terrace with a beer and a $1-a-kg lime, to enjoy another of this city's epic sunsets. How can the world possibly be stressful when this is what I get to come home to?

cheers

The Guardian describes this album as "undemanding" which I personally think is an uncharitable description. But even if that was the case, in a world where ordering lunch is a 10-minute ordeal in public humiliation, maybe the undemandingness of this album is all part of its appeal.