Brothers (2010)

Brothers (2010)

Over night but also after five albums, the Black Keys changed. Attack & Release might’ve hinted at some new diversity in sound and style, but there were still stretches of that record that sounded rooted in the Black Keys’ earlier work, just dressed up with Danger Mouse’s influence. I remember having moved on from Black Keys before Brothers came out. They were the kind of band I liked throwing on when I was younger, but it had all started to get too boring, too similar. And then Brothers came out and floored me, and a lot of other people, too. It might’ve been easy to find Black Keys on festival lineups and in commercials and TV shows before this, but this was different. This is one of those weird things about this band’s career: they got steadily positive reviews and constant licensing deals, but somehow Brothers felt like a turning point where they really blew up in a more mainstream way, partially rooted in the fact that “Tighten Up” and “Howlin’ For You” felt ubiquitous regardless of their chart positions (which were the highest the Black Keys had yet achieved, anyway).

From a musical standpoint, it felt like the band finally arrived someplace that was both surprising for them and had, in another way, been awaited for the preceding several years. Soul and psychedelia and straight classic rock influences fleshed out their sound; Auerbach employed a falsetto surprisingly well on highlights like “Everlasting Light,” and “The Only One.” “Next Girl” might be the last old-school Black Keys song the band has done, and it’s one of their best in that form — its familiar chug possessing more urgency than usual. In different ways, “The Only One” and “Sinister Kid” had addictive grooves that set the stage for the across-the-board infectiousness of El Camino. Most importantly, though, Brothers was perhaps the first Black Keys album that felt like it had a reason to exist relative to their other work beyond the fact that some time had passed and it was time for them to crank out more music. Auerbach and Carney had reached a breaking point leading up to this album. Between Carney’s divorce and Auerbach’s solo album Keep It Hid, which Carney claims was a complete surprise to him, there was the possibility that the Black Keys were done. But they reconciled and made an album called Brothers. It felt like a mission statement, finally, for what the Black Keys could be beyond the one trick they’d learned to do really well in the first phase of their career. Its unruly swampiness is part of what makes it great, but might be too much to make it their masterwork. But it’s also likely that, depending on how many more records these guys release, it will live on as perhaps their most definitive work: The one where it really felt like they had a stake in it this time. And it paid off, resulting in an album that summed up everything these two did well together.