So after the White Stripes invented the blues in 1999, the Black Keys stole it and then proceeded to live near Jack White just to spite him. At some point they made an LP with one of my favourite LP covers ever, which sounds great whilst driving at night through a storm.
So in 2011 the duo dropped El Camino and I was a first day buyer despite the fact it was a damnably expensive record*, I just really liked the LP cover which I assumed featured an El Camino.
Rushing home to play El Camino I levitated with joy at opener ‘Lonely Boy’ and the glam blues stomp of ‘Gold On the Ceiling’ and then … the rest was varying shades of okay-grey. What did give the album legs was the fact that my 10-year old daughter just loved it and so it lived in our car for about 2 years afterwards. The memory of it still makes me smile today particularly as, afflicted by the 1537 family illness, she has just ordered a copy for herself. I can remember my son singing the chorus of ‘Sister’ to her on the way to the child minder’s.
But how does it sound today?
El Camino‘s opener ‘Lonely Boy’, even stripped of its genius video** is the Black Keys best song. There’s something just so engaging about the way it hurtles along towards an utterly infectious chorus. Clever dudes, like a lot of the stuff I like best, it just passes the conscious mind and lodges directly in the brainstem. Absolutely joyous.
Oh and the video is something else.
Second best is ‘Gold On The Ceiling’ with its grindingly sleazy glam rock beat and the type of cocky chorus that you have to make extra room for in your ears. I have deliberately never looked up the lyrics as I just want to sample it all as a glorious, glamorous noise, I have suspicions its all about warning off an aspirational chick. Carney and Auerbach sound so locked in, so committed to it all, what’s not to love?
Third best is their blatant blatant blatant rip off of ‘Stairway To Heaven’, ‘Little Black Submarines’. Every single time I listen to this song I start off thinking I don’t like it very much but by the time the guitar blazes towards the end it has me by the short and curly-curlies, wishing the Black Keys blazed a bit harder more often.
After that El Camino has two distinct tiers of tracks, those like ‘Sister’, Money Maker’, ‘Dead And Gone’ and ‘Run Right Back’ that are interesting enough rhythmically to keep my attention and the snoozers like ‘Mind Eraser’, ‘Nova Baby’ and ‘Hell Of A Season’.
There are no bad tracks on El Camino per se, just some dull ones; which is worse, I reckon. The production from Danger Mouse is simpler, clearer than it was on Brothers and a lot less interesting too unfortunately, the songs stand and fall entirely on their own merits; the great ones soar, some bore.
For my money, all of it, I got a good LP sleeve here. The cardboard is thick enough to withstand a meteor strike, the gatefold shots of cheap vans in the Akron area are all good, as is the large poster/LP credit sheet. I get it, I like beat up vehicles too.
Except we Europeans didn’t get it, as Dan Auerbach noted, most of us did not register the disconnect between the muscle car of the title and the Plymouth Grand Voyager on the front cover. In my head I just translated it as ‘the way’, I actually thought it was a reference to pilgrimage^, but I was reading too much into it.
Maybe that is the case here with El Camino, wanting too much from a perfectly okay album, rather than just enjoying it for the beat up minivan it actually is.
Discuss, whilst I go and do my dance again.
1076 Down.
Ps: Just because.
*it still seems an expensive one to buy.
**which I have been known to recreate after sinking 3 too many on occasion.
^I am desperate to walk the Camino de Santiago one day.
