The Black Keys – Peaches! Review

Between performing at a cryptocurrency event to assuming they could shift tickets in arena-sized venues, The Black Keys have hardly had a vintage couple of years. Their latest album, Peaches!, looks to course correct. It does not. No Rain, No Flowers is hardly the best preceding album and what little cover it provided the band as they staggered forwards as a perhaps humbled duo is irrelevant now. They stagger on with a wound which needs treating, despite the self-made gaslighting from The Black Keys at play here. No, they mustn’t stop to attend to that gash in their heads, just plod on through with a Coca-Cola featuring album image and ten cover songs that’ll be interchangeable throughout a set which borders on nostalgia rounds as they find inventive new ways to build towards a run-through of Gold on the Ceiling. On we go with more from The Black Keys at their best, which, to the finely tuned ear, will sound like middle-of-the-road, blues-rock fodder.  

Fodder is expected from The Black Keys, especially when they aren’t particularly moved or inspired. Just take a listen to the opening song, Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire. All they deal in now is shoddy cliché. Spirited instrumental work opens Peaches!, but it soon becomes a bluster-filled, confusing mess backing an uninspired vocal performance. Songs of love and hate with the usual flickers of blues-y tone and terror. Not much sticks around in the mind through Peaches!, and there is less still that’ll be worth returning to thanks to The Black Keys’ muted spin on blues-rock classics. Repeating the title of the song with a buzzing, irritating instrumental mixture is hardly inspired work. It feels beneath The Black Keys, but they’ve been playing limbo with their sound for years now. How low can they go? Quite low, as Peaches! shows. It’s not that the band has lost a step with their instrumental skill; it’s just that they sound unsure of what to do with the tools at hand. All they do is hobble along with some clunky instrumentals, unconvincing and often underwhelming.  

This is the sound Cage the Elephant moved on from after Borderlands. Who’s Been Foolin’ You has the band not adapt their style but borrow from the blues of the past. The Black Keys frequently touch on a sound that feels intimately known but not at all fresh. When they manage to keep quiet and let the instrumentals take centre stage, there’s moments of joy. It’s a Dream has the lion’s share of this, though it isn’t all that staggering an experience either. There’s a muted feel to all these blues-rock experiences, not one song on Peaches! appears to host the emotional depths necessary to the genre. Take Tomorrow Night, for instance, instrumentally vibrant but shallow. The Black Keys does not work to hold your attention here. They seem to be having fun themselves, but it never translates to the similar-sounding instrumentals which are littered across Peaches! 

A shame, too. There’s a likeable crunch to the guitar work throughout. Something to cling to as you muddle your way through the likes of She Does It Right and Nobody But You Baby, songs so dense and obvious you’d be forgiven for thinking The Black Keys did not trust their audience to grasp at nuance. But this is not a mistrust in listeners, no. This is The Black Keys struggling to convince themselves that they can write. Fireman Ring the Bell has them pull at their guitar influences, with little to show for it. What unlucky endeavours these are, and how concerning it must be to hear the cogs turning as they do, dribbling out some of the most mundane blues rock you’ll come across. Great for those who say they’re fans of blues-rock, but don’t actually like it. The Black Keys cosplay as a band moved by the vigour, soul, and heart of the genre. It’s an ugly-sounding piece of work, much like their last two albums.