Brothers

After four albums of fuzzed-up garage-blues, in 2008 it suddenly seemed as if The Black Keys didn’t want to be The Black Keys any more. First of all they roped in Dangermouse to produce their Attack & Release album; that still basically sounded like its predecessors with some extra production flourishes, so they went back to the drawing board.

When it was announced that Danger Mouse would be working with the Black Keys on their 2008 album, Attack & Release, it seemed like a fresh start for a band that had run out of ideas. While DM indeed brought some psychedelic side dishes to Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney's meat-and-potatoes blues-rock table-- a little pan flute here, some spaghetti Western guitar licks there-- Attack & Release had its share of samey-sounding midtempo cuts, sugges ting that the duo were content to write variations on the same theme. Subsequent side projects (both worked in Damon Dash's not-disastrous rap-rock experiment Blakroc, and Carney formed the all-percussion group Drummer) suggested that they probably felt this creative stagnation, too. As for Auerbach's basically-a-Black-Keys-album solo effort, Keep It Hid: guy's gotta get it out of his system somehow.