Black Keys rock the blues in a lean, packed set
One Tuesday night after a club show a few years back, Black Keys singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney were manning the merch table inside T.T. the Bear's Place in Cambridge, chatting with fans and signing some autographs. At one point, Auberbach - unprepared, apparently, for such requests - politely attempted to hand us back a black Sharpie pen we had given him. Keep it, we told him. You guys are going to need it.
Last month, the duo's fifth album, "Attack & Release," sold 30,000 copies during its first week of release - roughly 300 times the number of people who caught the band's show at T.T.'s that night. And during a sold-out concert at the Orpheum Theatre Saturday evening - the final US date of an international tour that takes them to Europe this week - the Black Keys thrilled an audience of 2,700-plus with a lean 75-minute set long on mesmerizing hoodoo garage-blues and short on convention or flabby filler.
What remains remarkable, after all this time and even after the initial shock of seeing and hearing them wears off, is how two skinny 20-something white guys from Akron, Ohio - who once recorded for Oxford, Miss.'s Fat Possum blues label before signing with the big boys at Warner Brothers - can mine such deep roots and summon such soulful fire.
The simultaneously show-opening, show-stopping "Girl Is On My Mind," a primal slab of moaning desire, was born in a suburban basement but sounded like an ancient flame heaven-sent from the hills of Keys' heroes like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside. The new "I Got Mine," replete with riffs deadly as a razor or a rattlesnake and powered by Carney's elemental, relentless whomp, conjured its own universe of sweat, tough times, and triumph, no bass guitar necessary.
The twin trance-blues romps of "Stack Shot Billy" and "Busted" had Auerbach coaxing high, hypnotic drama on slide guitar, and applying his creosote-soaked voice for smoky flavor. "The Breaks" was a squealing tease - outwardly coy to soften the blow, perhaps - but emotionally yearning for a lover who's left.
The only loss of forward momentum came during the encore's oddly flat-footed "Oceans and Streams," which featured Auerbach behind a keyboard but still somehow wrenching guitar-like sounds from the instrument. But then it was back to the thickly distorted guitars of "Till I Get My Way," which closed the show in a satisfying haze of smeared, sexy heat. Attack and release, indeed.
Buffalo Killers, a hirsute trio of fellow Ohioans from Cincinnati whose latest album is being produced by Auberbach, opened with a 40-minute set of shaggy stoner-boogie that was as woolly as the band. High, keening harmonies, occasionally overlong Mountain-ous jams, and songs about the virtues of "homegrown" um, vegetables were the order of the day.
