“Tighten Up”
from the album Brothers
2010
iTunes
Ah! What’s that high-pitched needling? Oh, yeah. The purists. They’re put out that The Black Keys are flirting with an out-and-out pop ditty with “Tighten Up,” the whistling-‘n’-reverb first single off the duo’s new Brothers. Yet another collaboration with Danger Mouse (who polished up the Akron, Ohio boys’ rubber-city scuzz on 2008’s Attack & Release), it’s held as further evidence that the band is straying from its gutbucket roots.
Further investigation reveals there’s scarce chance of that. The Keys are just diversifying.
Producing the rest of Brothers themselves while soaking up the fatback juju that permeates Alabama’s Muscle Shoals studios, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney dig into the broader continuum of psychedelica, hard R&B, and that great sugar-shack prophet, Marc Bolan, whose glammy T. Rex swagger inhabits the opening “Everlasting Light.”
True, much of Brothers flaunts the retro feel of something off ’70s AM radio, but we can’t imagine how that’s a drawback — especially when it results in swamp dramas as bewitching as “Ten Cent Pistol” or a beautiful chitlin’-circuit homage as committed as “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
It’s a slicker sound, but it’s weird slick. Check out the narcotic haze of “Black Mud” and the blown-tweeter buzz on “The Go-Getter.” It’s a sonic wonderland, we say. As that old blues magus Swamp Dogg would say, they’re not selling out, they’re buying in.