Photo: John Peets
The first time I ever heard the Black Keys was by accident: a song called “Thickfreakness,” which somehow ended up on one of Epitaph Records’ Punk-O-Rama compilations, bought during my early teenage punk phase. I bought the album in search of riff-heavy, energetic songs, and by my pop-punk sensibilities, the song was too slow and plodding. Whenever I listened to Punk-O-Rama 8, I always skipped “Thickfreakness” and discounted the Black Keys as a band I would never listen to.
It was unexpected when, eight years later, I heard a catchy song on satellite radio with the sense of quick-tempoed urgency that I always look for in music, only to look down and see it was the Black Keys. Their sense of musical restraint and release into a deranged frenzy of guitars was almost infectious, and I felt a sense of honesty so infrequent in contemporary music that I was taken aback. All of a sudden, I liked the Black Keys, and it took me by surprise.
It really shouldn’t have, since almost every Black Keys album released over the course of their eleven-year career has been more radio-friendly than the last. While Thickfreakness was a puddle of sludgy blues, El Camino utilizes more heavy garage rock, becoming the radio-friendly summer jam album of 2012. The songs on El Camino were written for the express purpose of sounding good when performed live, which is crucial considering that they’ve been touring non-stop for the past two years, finally headlining their first ever arena tour across North America since January.
The summer jams crowd was out in full force on Saturday, August 4th, when the Black Keys played a sold-out Molson Amphitheatre. Their set began with some of their catchier tunes from Brothers, “Howlin’ For You” and “Next Girl,” with two extra musicians to beef up the sound normally produced by the duo (childhood friends Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney). The extra musicians gave the show a distinctly weird vibe – with Auerbach required to do less of the heavy lifting on guitar, he seemed genuinely less excited to be playing his own songs. They proceeded to play a few more songs from El Camino, and the crowd erupted when they finally played “Gold on the Ceiling.”
The band’s interaction with the crowd was minimal, perhaps indicative of the exhaustion that comes after touring for six months straight. In between songs, Auerbach would say things like “let’s keep this thing moving right along,” as if he had other places to be; technically he did. The day before, the Black Keys had played Lollapalooza in Chicago, and the day after they travelled to Montreal to headline the Osheaga Festival.
After about 20 minutes, the two backup musicians left the stage so Carney and Auerbach could play some of their older material on their own, and the dynamic totally changed. They played as if they were the brothers their sixth album was named after, and all of a sudden it was obvious that these two men have known each other their entire lives. Auerbach’s heavy riffing on the guitar matched up with Carney’s vicious drumming, and they tore up the stage like hyenas ripping chunks of flesh off of a freshly killed zebra.
The best performances of the show were undoubtedly the ones that found the duo left to their own devices, but after four songs their backing musicians were back on stage for the rest of the show. From there, they launched into a full-on stadium rock performance for “Money Maker” (note the irony), which used colourful strobe lights to mimic a 1970s laser dome. Then they lowered a disco ball for their first encore performance of “Everlasting Light,” which was so perfect it was borderline cheesy.
The Black Keys are fantastic musicians who put on a great live show, but they are musicians first and performers second. Such a huge venue requires an artist/band whose personality can fill up the whole stadium, and this one relied on a stadium-rock lights show to maintain visual interest, which seemed somewhat out-of-character for the unassuming blues duo.
It’s fantastic that such talented musicians are selling out arenas, but some of the magic of live music is lost when you hear them play a massive outdoor stadium like the Molson Amphitheatre. The Black Keys are loud and intense, but outside the noise eventually trailed off, evaporating into thin air instead of heart-pounding reverberation.
Though the Black Keys have clearly spent a lot of effort fashioning their live act into something arena-friendly, their particular brand of garage-rock blues fell somewhat short of epic. While they put on a fantastic show that I happily paid altogether too much money to see, I’m not sure I agree wholeheartedly with the words of articulate Youtube commenter shokingyouout: “live version is way more in intense, when i heard it i had to change pants. one for jizzing in them and the other for shiting in them. The Black Keys are fucken epic!!!”
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Isabel Slone is a Toronto-based fashion blogger and writer. Follow her on Twitter at @isabelslone.
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