The Black Keys: Peaches! Album Review

It is perplexing, then, how staid and complacent Peaches! sounds, how the biggest eruption of the whole thing is right there in the title’s exclamation mark. The groove that frames opener “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire”—a crate-digger acoustic oddity that got such a boost from a 2019 reissue that Paul Weller covered it last year—is so hypnotic that Auerbach sings like he’s half-asleep. In 1975, Dr. Feelgood’s “She Does It Right” was all amphetamine jitters; it was a door propped open that young punks would soon tear down. It sounds both sexless and devoid of danger here, as though a pub rock band that’s taken a solemn vow of sobriety needed setlist filler.

Recorded more than 80 years ago, Big Boy Crudup’s elemental “Who’s Been Foolin’ You” should be a blank slate for the Black Keys, its perfect hook an invitation to go wild. But, again, they sound like they’re on autopilot, Auerbach’s voice smeared into near-inscrutability and his solos aiming for the splenetic until they crash into a safety net. Squirrel Nut Zippers mainstay and Mississippi native Jimbo Mathus is a musical firebrand who can make a reading of the alphabet feel exhilarating; he cranks hard on the organ here, trying to push the Keys into wilder and woolier territory. Three minutes in, they get close, then retreat until they escape to the exit. The kind of blues the Black Keys love is about pushing the stories of life’s most difficult and joyous experiences so hard the sound crackles in the red; they get the sound but not the feeling here. It’s a studio effect, as rote as rolling tape.

There are moments when this quintet proves how exciting they can be, when these songs seem to inspire more than the impulse to merely jam on them. Auerbach recently heard George Thorogood’s debut with the Destroyers for the first time, an ironic biographical note, as his own band is Thorogood’s spiritual and stylistic progeny. Their take on its opening cut, “You Got to Lose,” is electrifying, Auerbach belting out the title’s mantra with the kind of conviction only recent misery can render. Carney briefly quickens the rhythm in the middle, an ingenious little trick that makes the whole song seem anxious. And despite the rickety roller-coaster of their career for the last 20 years, the Keys still dig into Kimbrough’s music like it’s their very own, or at least some ancestral inheritance. Their seven-minute finale, “Nobody But You Baby,” is languid and heartsick, ravaged and wonderful. Abetted by the principal percussionist of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Carney slows the Kimbrough cut way down, building a perfect framework for Auerbach. At last, he sings and plays like he’s got something to say, like this music is more than a studio exercise.

As Peaches! begins, the band chatters on tape before sliding into “Smoke.” Turn up the volume, and you can hear Auerbach say, softly, “One more time.” This moment isn’t supposed to mean anything—it’s a studio vestige that bands like the Keys use to tell us that this is real, to let us peer into the room where they’re going to work. But every time I hear it, I feel a little sad for these fellas, now nearing 50 but sporting a less clear picture of what the Black Keys actually are than they had at 30. They feel one misstep away from the state-fair circuit, from being consigned to cover their past glories for a paycheck. How many times can they try something new, get rebuffed whether by popular perception or their own artistic enthusiasms, and run to the source of their sound for succor? One more time, at least.