Don't call The Black Keys 'garage blues'

NEW YORK -- Just because The Black Keys wear jeans and T-shirts, just because their production quality possesses that feeling of minimalist organic haze, just because they're a stripped-down, drums-and-guitar duo with a blues face and composite soul that veers everywhere from esoteric punk to the old-time harmonies frontman Dan Auerbach used to sing with his mother as a kid ... that does not make them a garage band.

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Garage blues. That's the term you'll see stuck on the Black Keys, which is fine, as far as any of the multitude of limiting modern genre constructions are fine, fine because of the understanding that we need terms like this to connect the good music that's being made now to the good music that was being made then.

It's fine. Just don't use the terminology to their faces.

"Sometimes I feel like music that's called blues nowadays is not relevant to anybody, and it's just background music," Auerbach says carefully, sitting next to drummer Patrick Carney in a hotel cafe a few hours before a show. "And that's why it's hard for us to want to be associated with it, you know? I love blues music, but I'm really picky about what I listen to, you know? So it's weird. A love-hate relationship."

At first glance, or maybe second, the 20-something Akron, Ohio natives form a neat ying/yang symbiosis. Carney, awkward, lanky, and bespectacled, is eccentrically hyper-intelligent and at times hilariously satirical, whose affable geek skepticism melts unexpectedly into the primal rage with which he attacks his drums. Auerbach is the meditatively laid-back guitarist whose farm-kid looks are belied by his almost comically nonsensical, moaning voice and the possessed ferocity of his guitar play.

Like any good "blues" band, there are interesting familial ties. Carney is the nephew of Ralph Carney, a longtime saxophone player with Tom Waits, while Auerbach is the cousin of the late Robert Quine, an immensely influential punk guitarist who left his mark on everything from albums like Richard Hell and The Voidoids "The Blank Generation" and a Velvet Underground Bootleg series to further collaborations with Lou Reed and Brian Eno.

"We've been playing together since we were like 16 or 17. We lived around the corner from each other," Auerbach says. "We knew each other when we were kids, and we had this friend who lived across the street from me that mentioned that we should get together and play sometime. When you've played together for a while, you just learn how to spice things up."

Of course within any drums-and-guitar duo, the threat of homogeneity lurks around every turn, particularly after every successful one. You'd have to think that the band's structure would place real limitations on the continuing expansion of its sound -- which makes the recently released "Rubber Factory" quite possibly the band's finest accomplishment. And which, given the covert critical praise of its first two albums, is saying something.   Continued...