While The Black Keys are no strangers to covers – those filthy versions of The Beatles’ She Said, She Said and The Sonics-inspired Have Love Will Travel from their earliest days still linger – they’ve long become estranged from the grit and grime that once defined their sound.
Indeed, you’d have to go back to 2008’s Attack And Release to find the band who, alongside The White Stripes, infused the blues with a garage-punk sensibility that dragged the form towards a new generation. And let’s not forget 2006’s Chulahoma EP, a celebration of Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough, while 2021’s Delta Kreme paid tribute to his regional compatriots.
On their new record, however, The Black Keys cast their net wider, assembling a collection of reinterpretations drawn from the blues-based musicians who first fired their imagination. More importantly, they’ve made a long-overdue and welcome return to the cranked-up amps, distortion and rawness that first fuelled them.
Born from sessions instigated by drummer Patrick Carney as a respite for singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach while his father was terminally ill, Peaches! is as fuzzy and, ultimately, as sweet as the fruit it’s named after. Corralling guitarist Kenny Brown, bassist Eric Deaton and multi-instrumentalist Jimbo Mathus into Auerbach’s studio in Nashville, the sessions have produced an album that feels unencumbered by expectation, revelling in music that’s its own reward. And with the sessions largely recorded live and with the minimum of overdubs, Peaches! is infused with an urgency and intimacy that’s impossible to fake.
Crucially, they have plucked diamonds from the mine. Although the inclusion of two Junior Kimbrough numbers – Nobody But You Baby and Tomorrow Night – are hardly surprising, here both are shot through with a mystical swagger, the former digging a particularly deep groove. More unexpected is the teeth-grinding boogie of Dr Feelgood’s She Does It Right slowed down to the point where the song develops an entirely new, salacious personality of its own. Likewise, Willie Griffin’s Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire becomes an electrified jolt, and George Thorogood’s You Got To Lose is slashed and torn in a midnight rumble.
By returning to their sonic roots, The Black Keys sound revitalised, urgent and gloriously unrefined once again. Whether they pursue this righteous path remains to be seen, but this is exactly what’s needed from them now.
