Twenty years and one day after the release of "The Big Come Up" and one year after its tenth delivery, the country-blues cover album "Delta Kream", the duo formed by Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney come back with a new opus in the form of a return to their roots: "D'ropout Boogie".
Recorded and composed at Easy Eye Sound, the guitarist's Nashville studio where "Delta Kream" had already been captured in a single one-day session, this new opus shows a newfound spontaneity and allows us to hear a number of first takes and improvisations, because mistakes and feelings are what differentiate man from machine.
Inviting for the first time outsiders to write with them, The Black Keys welcome Greg Cartwright from Reigning Sound and the professional songwriter who once worked for Taylor Swift or Kings Of Leon, Angelo Petraglia. The result? Acoustic jams that give birth to hybrid monsters that seem to wink at the Troggs ('Wild Child', the first radio-friendly single to feature a wah-wah pedal for the first time in the band's history) or at Soul with a capital "S" from the 60s ('It Ain't Over').
The blues is there, of course, lurking under the fuzz and the hammered toms, from the shuffle of 'For The Love Of Money' to the lament of 'How Long' through the heaviness of 'Baby I'm Coming Home' and the pamphlet 'Burn The Damn Thing Down'.
But who says blues, boogie and guitar says Billy F. Gibbons and Mr. ZZ Top comes to put his long and calloused fingers on 'Good Love' to give just the right amount of gas to this machine stuck in an oily garage so that it can roll down the highway and swallow the miles.
Until the next stop.