Nashville, Tennessee, is renowned as the home of country music. And yet this very traditional town has become home to a number of noisy, un-house-trained rock bands of late. Jack White moved his family from Detroit to Nashville some years ago to run Third Man Records; Nashville is where the troubled Kings of Leon call home. More recently, blues-rock duo the Black Keys left their native Ohio to take the waters and record their seventh album there.
Perhaps not coincidentally, El Camino finds the Black Keys moving into a space sited halfway between Jack's place and Leon mansions. Ever since the Black Keys' visceral second album, 2003's garage-blues romp Thickfreakness hoiked its riffs over the parapet, guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney have been dogged by unfavourable comparisons with the White Stripes, a similarly underpopulated, bass-less and raucous two piece with a colour in their name.
The Keys finally shrugged off those comparisons with the release of their last album, 2010's Brothers, a Billboard No 2 album that catapulted the pair out of renown and into contention. It has sold around 1 million copies worldwide and bagged the band three Grammys, thanks in part to its louche subtlety, groove content and the nimble Danger Mouse production flourishes on its hit single, "Tighten Up". At the time of writing, the Black Keys have just sold out two nights at London's 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace next February, laying bare the exaggeration in industry assumptions that rock acts are a spent force.
El Camino, though, sounds nothing like Brothers. Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton is back on board for the whole album this time and he seems to have tightened up the Black Keys' act rather than loosened it. Sidelong, cross-genre winks at R&B are conspicuous by their absence. The album's Nashville genesis is pretty much irrelevant – the creative flags here all point to rock'n'roll and 60s garage. The Keys have also name-dropped the Clash and the Cramps as influences this time around, but neither really stands proud, unless you count the surprise reggae slouch that creeps up on "Hell of a Season".
Sometimes, the gnarl here is superlative. "Little Black Submarines" begins as an unremarkable acoustic ballad, but halfway through, Auerbach's guitar and Carney's drums erupt triumphantly in full lairy Zeppelin mode. It's hard to resist the taut and catchy single, "Lonely Boy" – an opener that lays bare this album's prerogatives. As El Camino wends on, tracks such as "Stop Stop" reinforce the impression of a punchy, danceable record built for good times.
This increased vigour comes at a small price. El Camino may be fast and fun, but it is also somewhat undemanding. It lacks the eclectic savvy of Brothers and other Keys' works, notably 2009's Blakroc collaborations with a host of hip-hop names. Songs such as "Sister" manage to fuse a kind of 70s smugness with an 80s pop-rock sensibility.
You could categorise El Camino – an album named for a car that is not the car on its cover – as a great leap backwards, full of the spirit of the band's early period, but retooled and souped-up with an ear for the bigger spaces. In revving so hard, though, the Black Keys have perhaps left behind in the dust the subtleties that made Brothers such an intriguing ride.
