The Black Keys new album - "Brothers"

[sky blue bats]

Any one excited about this? I heard Tighten Up and a little bit of another song on NPR. I think I like it, I like that they are using other instruments and the studio more!!

[marino13]

Any one excited about this? I heard Tighten Up and a little bit of another song on NPR. I think I like it, I like that they are using other instruments and the studio more!!

 

Super excited about this one. I've read it is more along the lines of the Auerbach solo album, which was one of my favorites of 2010. Auerbach might be my favorite right now, so much soul. I am also glad that they are trying new things in the studio, things were getting a little stale by the time Magic Potion came out. However, I think their preference is still to keep it stripped down and raw for the live show. Here is some info posted on another forum that is from an interview with Mark Neill, a guy involved with the recording. I dare you to read this and not get even more pumped for this album!

 

"I’ve noticed on your forum somebody said ‘What do you mean this is their first soul record?’ People don’t understand what soul means. That’s not a slam, that’s a compliment. Soul music is very difficult to play. The people who played on soul records were not amateurs, they were not indie rock musicians, they were professional seasoned players who could probably play jazz proficiently. Barry Beckett, Roger Hawkins, David Hood, Jimmy Johnson, these guys were fantastic musicians – they had the timing of a swiss watch – they were so good. The Black Keys to go in and play soul RnB music, which is the music of the area, which is something The Black Keys have always done, but to make an album of that kind of feeling, this is the first time their intentions were this focused on a project like that. I feel like they were so good as artists that they were sensitive to the area’s vibe makes you feel that way. I compliment Pat for being tactful, but being really direct – “I’m not sure what this is, it’s hard to describe and we’re still working on it” – that is dead accurate. When we’re all done with it maybe people will call it a heavy metal record, who knows? [laughs]So, is it generally a heavier sound?

 

It’s the heaviest record they’ve ever made. ‘Keep It Hid’ is heavy, this is heavier.

 

Like a ‘Thickfreakness’ sound, raw, straight up rock record?

 

No, it’s heavy in that way…how can I describe it. It’s heavy in the way a bass or kick drum plays a note you can hear the decay in the whole instrument. There’s that much space. Which is to say it’s not mashed together and treble-ly, it’s very spaced out and deep. They don’t have a bass player because they are a two piece. They didn’t de-tune their guitars to D or some low tuning, or C, and it’s heavier than most of the bands that do that [laughs]. Most bands when they want a big heavy sound they tune down to some ridiculously low tuning and they did not do that. They stayed up to standard tuning. In their craft they are making a record heavier than most of those bands make.

 

Some of the recent albums (Attack and Release) have delved into piano lines and mixture of elements, were there those kind of influences?

 

Let me say this about the way they did it before. The way they did it before I liked, but it sounded more like over dubs of those elements. This record is seamless. Sometimes you think a guitar is a keyboard, sometimes you think a keyboard is a guitar. I’m proud about what we were all doing in one room together because there was a natural ability for everyone to be on the same page without talking about it much. Pat did a lot of keyboard work on it but sometimes it sounds like a guitar.

 

This is the thing that is amazing about those guys, I have been quoted as saying I think these guys have been ready to make this record songs-wise. After ‘Keep It Hid’ I was convinced the next Black Keys record was going to be a monster because look what ‘Keep It Hid’ sounded like. All you have to do is add Pat to that equation an imagine how great that’s gonna be. The only reason Pat and Dan haven’t made a record like ‘Keep It Hid’ is because when you’re a big band and you’re in the music industry you have tonnes of people telling you ‘that’s a great direction’, ‘this is what radio is doing’, ‘this is what we expect’, so they don’t really listen to these people that much but they do a little bit, and it’s just enough to keep them from doing exactly what they want to do. I’ll qualify that by saying I’m pretty sure, knowing that those guys are moving targets, the two of them know what they want [laughs].

 

Can you explain how the tracks were laid down. Was it just the guys getting in there and feeling the vibe, having an idea and then bouncing off?

 

One of the production techniques I’ve always used which is really simple is if you are sympathetic to the band’s cause, and you have a record collection of 45s like I do which goes back to the 60s when I started collecting, and if I know that Dan wants to play some bass on the record and we talk about some of the incredible moments in rock n roll or rnb, I get a a feel. I brought some strange records that had bass on them. Those 45s are played in the studio and they themselves have a ton of stuff stockpiled on their iphones, all kinds of stuff. So everyone was bringing in music and playing it. Nothing in particular was influencing one particular bass line. It was just a soup being boiled. That’s what we would talk about from day to day, how far in one direction we should go.

 

The Black Keys are incredibly talented at assimilating a feeling and making that into an identifiable riff. I’m extremely happy those guys were hell bent on making sure none of it was similar to anything. Most people copy records they like, copy the lick. Dan and Pat on this record did not do that. We had a feel thing going on where you played a 45 or off their iphone before we got going on these huge Voice of the Theater Altec Speakers, that’s actually louder than the band, it was very easy to get excited playing a really wierd record in there really loud. But we just used the feels, we were never interested in using any direct extraction of a lick or a motif or anything.

 

You’ve mentioned that Dan sounds like Otis Redding with the emotion coming through his voice?

 

I think that Dan has been for many many years misunderstood as being quote ‘King of the indie rock, soulful, bluesy, but you know from the wild and crazy Black Keys’. They wildly under-estimate the artistic aspects of Pat’s contributions and the fact that Dan is a drag out soul singer, he can sing soul music. Not that many white kids from middle class Akron can do that [laughs], in fact none of them. I mean it as a total compliment to him that he can do it naturally and not as an imitation, he doesn’t imitate anyone that I can tell.

 

I know a lot of people are fans of your recording style. On this record, tell me about the recording set up, did you have just one microphone or a simple set up?

 

I hope no one ever tries to mix any of this [laughs] because a lot of it was captured on 1 or 2 microphones, here or there. The reason why is because when me and Dan and Pat had talked about going down there was to capture what they sound like in a given room. The way Joel Hamilton describes it about capturing different eras of music, technology and microphones, my view is just make a decision. Dan and Pat made a decision to go to the South in a cinder block old building and to capture them in that room. If you set up a Neumann microphone within a couple of foot of a source you’re going to get as good a sound as that microphone can give you. Adding more tracks and microphones is not going to help you later unless you intend on having it re-mixed by a dozen engineers. Which is not the way we designed this. We specifically designed this not to be mixed by anybody but me. But having said that we have had some discussions about radio mixes hear and there and we’ve accommodated that, but I feel sorry for the person who has to mix this [laughs]. Even over dubs are done in groups, where there are several people playing or singing into one microphone."

 

Photo Courtesy of David Doyle: Mark Neill and The Black Keys in the studio

[Shakespeare In The Alley]

First three songs are amazing. Definitely looking forward to it.

[driver 8]

I've avoided the songs that have been released so far... can't wait to hear it.

 

Rubber Factory is still my favourite by far.

[stooka]

Seriously considering going to Kansas City to see them at The Crossroads. Any opinions about KC or the venue would be greatly appreciated.

[CortezTheKiller]

Rubber Factory is still my favourite by far.

Was/Is mine as well. However, I think it will lose that distinction by next week.

[nodep5]

I think I'm off from a lot of people on the Black Keys, but Magic Potion is my favorite with Attack and Release taking the longest for me to warm up to. I'm avoiding hearing the new one till release day. We'll see, I liked the rawness prior to the Danger Mouse involvement.

[bleedorange]

I haven't been able to really get into the Black Keys, but I'm actually excited about this new album from everything I've been hearing and reading about it.

[solace]

I think I'm off from a lot of people on the Black Keys, but Magic Potion is my favorite with Attack and Release taking the longest for me to warm up to. I'm avoiding hearing the new one till release day. We'll see, I liked the rawness prior to the Danger Mouse involvement.

 

Danger Mouse only produced one song on this new one, the single 'Tighten Up'

[CortezTheKiller]

Just pulled this off Nonesuch's site.

 

 

About this Album

 

In the August heat of 2009, The Black Keys left a Brooklyn studio—where they’d been working with an all-star posse of MCs—for 10 days in creative isolation at the historic Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama. Their geographical trek mirrored a musical journey, from contemporary hip-hop jams to the hallowed ground of classic R&B, that has resulted in the most cohesive album—and the deepest, steamiest grooves—of the duo’s eight-year career. These sessions yielded tunes that have the instantaneous, gotta-hear-it-again pull of a vintage 45; leadoff track “Everlasting Light” sounds like something Marc Bolan of T-Rex might have cut if he’d been signed to Stax. But more than just genre- and decade-hopping fun, there’s an emotional candor and narrative quality to the songs that offer a whole new level of soulfulness to the already floorboards-shaking sound of The Black Keys.

 

Brothers is, in many ways, the culmination of a tumultuous period for Auerbach and Carney as they juggled personal challenges with creative opportunities. For the first time in a career of non-stop touring and recording, Auerbach and Carney embarked on projects of their own, on top of their dates for The Black Keys. Auerbach made his solo debut, Keep It Hid, and hit the road with a full band; Carney picked up the bass for his own combo, Drummer, comprising five notable Ohioan drummers, only one of whom actually sits behind the kit on their disc, Feel Good Together.

 

Carney, in the midst of a divorce, relocated to New York City from Akron, where Auerbach continues to reside with his young family and has built his own studio, Easy Eye Sound System, modeled after the great live rooms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. (“It’s the nicest studio I’ve been to,” quips Auerbach, “because it was made for me.”) The pair came to Brooklyn at the behest of rap mogul Damon Dash, a fan of The Black Keys who’d invited them to work with rapper Jim Jones. That idea morphed into a bona fide super-session between the boys and some serious hip-hop figures that they wanted to collaborate with, including Mos Def, Raekwon, Q-Tip, and RZA. The result was the independently released Blakroc, a hip hop-R&B hybrid that the NME called “genuinely organic, a common ground of moods … with a slinky, groovy, maxi-fuzzed blues rock to match [the MC’s] swagger.” No sooner had they wrapped the Blakroc dates then they were on their way to Muscle Shoals to find out where their inspiration might lead.

 

As Carney recalls, “We were going to Brooklyn every other weekend for a couple of months. We finished Blakroc two or three days before we started our record. Blakroc was kind of a warm up for Brothers. In the process of making the Blakroc record we got more and more accustomed to the approach of making music with more bass lines and keyboard riffs than guitar riffs. There is less guitar on this record than any of our other records. I think we were just trying to focus on the grooves rather than what we had expected from ourselves previously.”

 

Auerbach concurs: “We were basically listening to soul music and hip hop for the week we were down there. That definitely had a lot to do with the way we went about crafting the songs.”

 

The first track they tackled was “Next Girl,” which, says Carney, “set the tone for the record, with the openness and the simplicity of the bass line.” The song—boasting a cocky, moving-on attitude and a smoldering tempo that mask the heartbreak at its core—wasn’t meant to be autobiographical, but it helped Carney move past what was ailing him that summer. As Auerbach observed, “Pat was in a rough spot, but that song energized him, I think. We didn’t do it on purpose, it just happened that way, but then we were off and running.”

 

As with countless musicians who’d ventured to Muscle Shoals before them, The Black Keys were attracted to the legacy—and the atmosphere—of a studio where everyone from Aretha to the Stones had done time.

 

Ultimately, though, their music evolves out of a somewhat mysterious inner space they’re able to access wherever they go. As Auerbach puts it, “I think that whenever you go some place that has a lot of rich history, you always kind of get a good feeling and that was definitely there for us. We got what we needed out of that room. But I sort of feel that Pat and I can do it anywhere; it’s not dependent on where we are. We’ve been playing together for so long, honestly, we don’t need windows, we don’t need to see a beach or a city. It’s like when we’re working, we work for 12 or 13 hours straight and never go outside. We just get so focused.”

 

In addition to engineer/producer Mark Neill’s recording gear, the pair brought a lot of Auerbach’s vintage gear from Easy Eye Sound System, where they’d earlier cut demo-style tracks for the album. So Akron was as essential to Brothers as Alabama; in fact, they liked the demos for such tracks as “Unknown Brother” and “Black Mud” enough that, says Carney, “We ended up going back to those in January and finishing them up at Dan’s place.”

 

While they were in Alabama, there wasn’t much in the way of outside diversion between Muscle Shoals and their Marriott. After long days in the studio, they’d return to the hotel to try to unwind. And unwind, in their fashion, they did. Carney admits, laughing, “At some point we called our management at three in the morning and left a cryptic voice mail to, like, bring a harpsichord. I don’t even know if Dan realized we’d done that. But the next day our manager showed up from Nashville with the harpsichord and we had both spaced on what had happened.”

 

Along with the harpsichord, they utilized a Mellotron that Auerbach had purchased, ideal for adding subtle, ghostly, synth-like textures to these tracks. Auerbach himself experimented with his vocals, emboldened by his hip-hop colleagues: “I definitely was influenced doing that Blakroc record, seeing everyone really go for it. I’d never seen anyone else record that way. Someone like Mos or Raekwon, they can really get into character in front of the microphone. So I really went for it, too, and did all kinds of different shit, I used whatever range I had. I sang in a few different ways, but none that I thought wasn’t natural.” He employs a surprisingly silky falsetto on the one-take vocal of “Everlasting Light” as well as on “The Only One” and, overall, delivers some of the most soul-baring vocal performances of his career. He narrates a tale of jealousy and revenge on “Ten Cent Pistol;” draws from life on ” Unknown Brother,” written for his late brother-in-law; and mixes the real and imagined over the coolly evil vibe of “Sinister Kid.” As he explains, “Whether it’s a made-up story or not, it all felt very personal to me.” The pair also takes a sweet turn on a cover of Jerry Butler’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” before closing the set with the melancholy ballad, “These Days.” Jokes Auerbach, “We like to go out with a teardrop. Leave ‘em crying.”

 

Brothers is more stripped down than Attack & Release, the 2008 album they cut mostly in a vintage studio outside Cleveland with producer Danger Mouse and several guest players. Danger Mouse returned to produce “Tighten Up,” but there are no additional musicians, save for Atlanta-based R&B belter Nicole Wray, a former Missy Elliot protégé who contributes backing vocals to “Everlasting Light,” “Next Girl,” and “Howlin’ For You.” Yet the sound of Brothers feels like another huge step forward. The Black Keys rely on less yet ingeniously achieve more.

 

Grammy Award–winning engineer-auteur Tchad Blake mixed the album and totally got the concept. Auerbach describes him as “a genius with audio, a complete wizard, because we recorded these songs in a really minimal way. There are no more than 11 or 12 tracks on one song. All the drums are on one or two tracks, which is sort of unheard of in the modern-day recording world. Tchad does a lot of mixing where I’m sure he gets, you know, 40 or 50 tracks on one song. So he was really excited about our record, he would call us up and just tell us how much fun it is to mix this stuff because it was so raw.” For Carney, as he told Rolling Stone, bringing in Blake at the end underscored the attitude and the aim of Brothers: “He approaches mixing in the same way we approach making music. Respecting the past while being in the present.”

 

—Michael Hill

[sky blue bats]

I love this record

[solace]

absolutely stunning record...

 

it's already making huge waves among casual and non-fans alike on other forums i'm on.

 

[myboyblue]

I didn't find Magic Potion offensive in any way but, with the exception of the first two songs, it didn't hit me like Rubber Factory. Attack & Release still holds top spot but the new one is growing on me quickly. The only thing slowing it down is the fact that 20 other great albums released the same week.

 

Between the Keys outpt, Keep it Hid, the Drummer release, these guys are definitely a band on the plus side of their creative curve.

[solace]

and did you hear they supposedly have 2 more albums finished and may even release one of those later this year??

 

[fatheadfred]

Seriously considering going to Kansas City to see them at The Crossroads. Any opinions about KC or the venue would be greatly appreciated.

 

I am planning to go to the KC show. Got some passes. woohoo. Venue is rad. Seen Wilco there twice. Outdoors, easy street parking since there isn't much else around the area. Good brew choices, restaurant has some good grub. Dig the Black Keys, never seen 'em, yet.

[solace]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8llwu5h5tgU&feature=player_embedded

 

[myboyblue]

Demeaning to the soul of their music.

[jamieverv]

I can't stop listening to this record. This may be their best record and is the first great record of the year.

[mjpuczko]

no maybe about it. this is their best album. i'm so addicted to it.

[Azzurri]

this album is indeed awesome it's got such style and swagger, and has some nuanced sounds that maybe the other albums lacked. dan's singing is particularly good.

 

 

i've always liked their stuff, and they were incredible live when i saw them years ago, but kind of lost touch for the past two albums...brothers has made me want to go back to their entire catalog.

[Love Boat Captain]

this album is indeed awesome it's got such style and swagger, and has some nuanced sounds that maybe the other albums lacked. dan's singing is particularly good.

 

 

i've always liked their stuff, and they were incredible live when i saw them years ago, but kind of lost touch for the past two albums...brothers has made me want to go back to their entire catalog.

 

New one has made me do the same. Loving it, but really struck by the ferocity of "Rubber Factory". Had been a while since I listened to that one, but WOW! Gotta say I have spun that one a little more than the new one, but it's close...

[Sir Stewart]

Wow, just caught up to this thread - can't wait to hear this now.

(not a hint)

[Guest Ordinary Beehive]

I don't think I've ever even heard of The Black Keys, but the chatter in this thread makes me want to check them out.

[marino13]

I don't think I've ever even heard of The Black Keys, but the chatter in this thread makes me want to check them out.

 

Make sure you also check out Dan Auerbach's solo album, "Keep It Hid", one of my absolute favorites of 2009. The song "Real Desire" rips my guts out every time. I'm holding off on "Brothers" until it comes out on the 18th, but reading all this stuff is killing me.

[Guest Ordinary Beehive]

I'm currently listening to Rubber Factory on Grooveshark. Wow, these guys are awesome. I'll check out the Keep It Hid next.