Surf: my favourite album of 2015

By Emmett Robinson Smith

The Social Experiment. From left: Nate Fox,
Nico Segal a.k.a. Donnie Trumpet, Peter Cottontale, Chance the Rapper

As the year comes to a close, music publications far and wide are submitting their year-end “Best of 2015” lists. Different writers have different tastes, but, as expected, Kendrick Lamar’s instant-classic album To Pimp a Butterfly is sweeping the #1 spot. This is good. The album is excellent. But there’s another equally excellent album going criminally underappreciated by most critics. It’s the only work from 2015 – that I’ve heard, at least – that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as K-Dot’s politically-charged, musically capacious masterpiece. This album is Surf, from the Chicago-based collective Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment.

This album is dope, guys. It is. There are many reasons for this, so let’s get into it.

               

Quick note first: Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment are perhaps better known as the crew that backs Chance the Rapper. If you haven’t heard of Chance the Rapper, I pity you. Chance the Rapper is great. A music fan who doesn’t know about Chance is like a food fan who doesn’t know about ice cream.

                

However, though Chance is a selling point, and is featured extensively on Surf, it’s not his album. To call Surf a Chance album would be to call Surf a rap album, which is a restrictive categorization. Not to mention that it wouldn’t do justice to the work’s plethora of contributors. The album is, without question, a genre-defying collaborative effort, and Chance is a mere thread in this beautiful, intricate blanket of sound.

I guess, though, if I had to name one genre for this album to fall under, it would be “hip-hop.” Considering this, it’s one of the most musically sophisticated works in the hip-hop canon. In fact, if you took all the vocal tracks off of Surf, you’d still have a nuanced, colourful, and consistently engaging instrumental journey here. There’s the album opener, “Miracle,” a slow, textured prelude as lush and warm as the morning sun. A chorus of “ooh”, the first sound we hear on the album, is joined by a crescendoing trumpet duo and trembling string section. A soft electric guitar arpeggiates while an intermittent synth, similar in timbre to what Dr. Dre would have used circa The Chronic, punctuates it all. This minute-and-a-half exploration of harmony and texture is an apt intro to the album – a condensed promise of what lies ahead.

Donnie Trumpet’s trumpet playing is Surf’s understated essentiality. His performance mimics the wide palette of vocal expression through the horn, from intermittent outbursts to multi-syllabic musical sentences. On “Nothing Came to Me,” Donnie projects, over an open-fourth background trumpet harmony, a slow series of two-note shrieks. These eruptions are lonely, pained, and echoed, and are as pure an expression of solitude as words could ever muster. But on “Just Wait,” the precise midpoint of the album, Donnie’s playing is profuse and torrential. The song’s title hints at what he’s trying to say, too: “just wait – this album isn’t done yet. In fact, we haven’t even reached the best part.” Donnie explores the furthest corners of the major scale with ease, providing a boisterous, flamboyant case to keep the listener engaged.  And it works: the next song, “Familiar,” is a return to a more accessible sound. It’s a catchy, lyric-based jazz-hop groove, and it’s doubly effective after the preceding three-song suite of largely instrumental ear trips.

Though Surf is a cohesive listen from front to back, it also offers many small flashes of musical exhilaration. Take, for example, the abrupt steel-drum hits in “Sunday Candy” before the song charges forward into a double-time hopscotch tempo, or the moment in “Wanna Be Cool” when a crunchy vocal harmony wrenches the song out of its loping groove and into a tense, seemingly endless instant of turbulence. But Surf’s flickers of transcendence are perhaps best discovered on one’s own. In a musical age when the Mustard-drenched beat drop is prioritized, Surf comes pre-packaged with its own set of rules. These rules are malleable and subjective, however, and each artist featured on the album contributes a unique perspective, creating a vibrant collage of performances.

Surf’s most enticing trait is its communal style of expression. The guest list is diverse – Erykah Badu, J. Cole, Busta Rhymes, Quavo from Migos, among many others – but the ability to weave this varied set of artists into a unified work is another of the album’s most impressive and exciting achievements. King Louie spitting a confounding couplet such as “These bitches regular, and they smoke regular / If these bitches bad then bad bitches regular” on the same song as Chance giving a clinic in alliteration with “Two shoes in a pair, three peas in a pod / Three Ps in appropriate, groupies in a mob,” exemplifies this juxtaposition. Indeed, an infectious celebration of artistic differences permeates the album. In a year defined by petty feuds and “I’m the best” chest-thumpers (Hi Drake!), Surf is the refreshing opposite: an inclusive appreciation for the work of others, without measurement of superiority. On Surf, nobody is counting YouTube views, retweets, or album sales.            

While Surf’s genre-blending is undeniable, so is its hip-hop sensibility. Even so, in the context of the hip-hop landscape, the album is an outlier. Hip-hop has been, and will continue to be, a form that features competition as one of its most exciting assets. Rap beefs are the stuff of lore, and debates about “who had the best verse” on any given song are rampant in the hip-hop community. But these parameters dissolve on Surf. This is not to say, though, that the rappers on Surf are standing in a circle holding hands without pushing each other artistically; in fact, everyone raps their ass off on this album. (It’s hard to believe that the J. Cole that shows up on Surf and spits a verse as impressively vivid as anything he’s done is the same J. Cole that almost caused Jeremih’s “Planes” to crash and burn.) At any rate, the artists on Surf are aware of the differences between collaboration and competition. Surf demonstrates not that hip-hop shouldn’t be a genre defined by rivalry, but rather that it doesn’t have to be.

Surf is expansive but unified, idiosyncratic but accessible, rule-breaking but erudite, of-the-moment but timeless. This musical message-in-a-bottle, as per the album cover, is, I hope, something that more and more listeners will discover as time progresses. Perhaps the uplifting album closer “Pass the Vibes” captures the mantra of the album as a whole: “She had some vibes for me / I had no vibes for her. / She pressed them onto me / I have some vibes for her (I got the vibes now.)” So step into the world of Surf. Let Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment pass you their vibes. And, once you have them, be sure to pass them to somebody else.

Big K.R.I.T.’s Cadillactica: The Best, Most Underrated Hip-Hop Album of 2014

By Emmett Robinson Smith

“Tryna fuck the world, but my dick won’t fit,” Big K.R.I.T. snarls on “King of the South,” a track from his recent masterpiece Cadillactica. It’s a deceptively clever line: On surface level, it’s a ridiculous boast, but it also sums up his position on the rap spectrum right now. K.R.I.T. is doing everything he can to achieve greater acknowledgement in hip-hop, but nobody’s ready to hear it. 

The rap game blew its load last year. Major artists such as Drake, Eminem and Kanye West released solo albums in 2013. Smaller-scale artists Chance the Rapper, A$AP Rocky, Tyler, the Creator, and many more dropped albums. It seemed as though 2014 would be sparse for hip-hop.

            That’s not true. Although this year’s rap output was nowhere near as large as 2013, Big K.R.I.T.’s Cadillactica is going criminally underappreciated as music critics submit their year-end “Best Albums of 2014” lists. While it’s hard to compare hip-hop with other genres, the ambition and consistency of Cadillactica speaks for itself as an album of the year contender.

            K.R.I.T.’s finest asset is his capacity to echo his influences and simultaneously sound unlike anyone but himself, thanks to the chameleonic arsenal of moods, tones and styles in his flow. On the introspective, Lupe Fiasco-esque “Soul Food,” K.R.I.T. uses food as a metaphor for the disintegration of family values and relationships: “Some get bruised and battered / thrown away half-eaten as if their seeds never mattered.” “King of the South” compares to some of the most successful braggadocio rap tracks in recent memory – think Kendrick Lamar’s “Control” verse, or Drake’s “0 to 100.” K.R.I.T. raps his ass off on this “King of the South;” indeed, he runs circles around most MCs. But by the end of the last verse, his exasperation with his inability to gain commercial and critical success becomes evident: “Fuck ‘em, fuck ‘em, fuck ‘em, fuck ‘em, fuck ‘em,” he vents. On “Third Eye,” K.R.I.T. channels his inner Big Boi circa “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” as he fantasizes about “picket fences and chillin, playin’ instruments” with a girl he sees for the first time across the room. Anyone who has the guts to emulate OutKast in this day and age deserves to turn heads, especially in light of the Atlanta duo’s recent deification via their larger-than-life reunion tour this year.

            Indeed, the production is acutely Southern. Live-sounding brass instrumentation and female background choruses are layered over a bed of deep, throbbing bass and kick. That’s not to say, though, that Cadillactica’s production adheres strictly to Southern-style formulas. It follows the sound perfected on OutKast’s landmark 1998 album Aquemini, but with a distinctly futuristic twist. For example, on “Life,” the second track, K.R.I.T., who produced most of the album himself, uses epic synth chord hits and an operatic vocal chorus to convey the song’s space-age, intergalactic subject matter.

            What is probably holding Big K.R.I.T. back from widespread fame is his artistic scope: he’s an album-maker in a market where rappers are gaining success primarily from individual songs. Drake was one of the biggest names in hip-hop this year, and he didn’t even release an album – he released singles. With Cadillactica, there’s no easily identifiable potential radio single that stands above the rest of the songs. It’s not a collection of songs; it’s an album. So what’s an artist like K.R.I.T. to do? Give in to the requirements of commercial success by releasing radio-friendlier singles, or stay on his current plateau of popularity by being an album-maker in the truest sense of the word? In this case, K.R.I.T.’s genius is his worst enemy.

            It looks like he’s sticking to his guns: “What’s good for hip-hop may not be good for my soul / So I keep flexin’, wreckin’, for the people that respect it / Check it, fuck a ‘Control’,” he growls on the album’s penultimate track. Big K.R.I.T. is unflinching, original, and, most of all, honest. He’s created something special, and one can only hope that the rest of the world catches up to him as he zooms further into Cadillactica.

Metal Mondays with Corey Spetifore

Track Review: Wovenwar, "The Mason"

By Corey Spetifore

Before the fires of “All Rise” had a chance to fade away, Wovenwar has unleashed another inferno with the release of their second single, “The Mason.” Weighing in at just over 4 minutes long, the supergroup’s latest track is a delightfully relentless and creative piece of work, carrying a deeper, darker tone than the aforementioned single yet already demonstrating similarities in overall sound and musical content, which is on a fast track to becoming a signature sound for this group of fine musicians.

More or less, this song is a battle cry telling an all-too familiar tale of defeat, loss, and despair, and the reality of overcoming these personal demons. Wovenwar immediately attacks with suspenseful ferocity, displaying a grooving, arpeggiated riffing of all instruments that gives way to a resounding chord progression highlighted by the lead guitar’s artfully applied licks. Similar to “All Rise,” “The Mason” briefly backs off for the entrance of the vocal line, and reloads for the next round of ammunition to be fired in the pre-chorus. “And I, I have caved in,” chants Blay, “but I’m building from the wreckage,” lyrics which – intended or not – subtly and respectfully salute the remains of As I Lay Dying from which Blay’s fellow musicians have risen after the shocking conviction of ex-vocalist Tim Lambesis. The chorus borrows the same riff as found in the intro but also houses a second vocal line accompanying a steady, even-measured lead vocal. What makes this track stand out, however, is the amount of numerous small details tucked away here and there as the song progresses. The second pre-chorus is capped off by an articulate descending rhythm guitar and bass which slides effortlessly into the second chorus, which is not only longer than the first but also contains a more exacerbated lead melody. This continually building sense of emotion is further developed through a texturized bridge of 32^nd-note strumming and finally released in a cut-time, head-banging breakdown, accompanied by no more than two screamed syllables, adding to the effect of desperation the song aims for. The final chorus again switches up its lead melody as preparation for an otherwise unexpected and modulated outro, leaving the listener in awe of the uncanny combination of near-mathematical songwriting and elements of spontaneity. With adept musicality and finesse, “The Mason” has laid the ideal foundation for Wovenwar’s self-titled LP, dropping August 3^rd, 2014.

Review: Jack White, Lazaretto

By Emmett H Robinson Smith

Jack White has been known for his ability to churn out song after song without even thinking about it. The documentary It Might Get Loud shows White composing a song in about five minutes, and the result is impressive. So, for a guy with a knack for creating large amounts of quality material in a short time slot, it’s disappointing to discover what a mixed bag his new album Lazaretto is.

            Ever the creative, White wowed the public with his unorthodox promotion for the album. The title track is now the fastest record ever released, and the “Ultra LP” vinyl edition features a hologram that appears when the record is played. In this respect, White went the extra mile in unconventional musical practice, and as the hologram is only one of the many little tricks on the “Ultra LP” edition, it’s apparent that the “Ultra LP” is the best way to experience the work. However, for all its bells and whistles, Lazaretto ultimately falls short musically, especially in the context of the brilliant marketing strategies for the vinyl.

            The first half of White’s second solo full-length makes the album. On the opener “Three Women”, he expands on classic blues chord progressions by adding elaborate instrumentation: Female backup vocals, guitar, bass, organ, piano, and a busy riff performed by different instruments at different times. Musically, it’s an exciting introduction, but it’s a shame that the lyrics aren’t even in the same ballpark: “I got three women / red, blonde, and brunette” White boasts. If he’s trying to spite his ex-bandmate-and-wife Meg, it sounds more desperate than anything. The chorus consists of “Lawdy lawd” repeated ad nauseum, and it wears thin quickly. For its lyrical limitations, however, “Three Women” makes for a solid track one, and is a good lead into highlight track “Lazaretto”. Contrastingly, it’s one of the strongest tracks lyrically, and is arguably the best song on the album. Reminiscent of the blazing “Sixteen Saltines” from his 2012 solo effort Blunderbuss, it’s a high-energy banger, full of dirty guitar and relentless drums that echo Meg’s style. Jack White sounds especially invigorated: “Even God herself has fewer plans than me”, he spits into the mic. And the way he delivers it, one can’t help but believe him. It’s not perfect, though. This barn-burner gives way to a fiddle solo that Spin magazine used the perfect word for: limp. The solo is limp indeed; it’s a buzz kill, and it reflects how much of Lazaretto is sullied by feeble country attempts.

            As Blunderbuss showed, White had become more interested in a country/folk sound than ever before, and Lazaretto is even more fiddle-fueled than its predecessor. This move is confounding for White Stripes fans, and it pushes him more to the margins of relevance in the musical landscape than ever before. “Entitlement” is musically stale because it sounds like just about any other sombre, down-tempo rustic country tune. White questions who deserves what in life, and compares the youth of today to Caesar in their feelings of entitlement. The song sounds like it was written by a sadsack teenager – and it probably was. White reportedly derived inspiration for some of the album from writings he created when he was nineteen years old. “Entitlement” just one constituent of the surprisingly large group of country songs on the album that isn’t up to snuff not only compared to Lazaretto’s rock songs, but especially compared to calibre of White’s previous rock-based discography. If Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and company had performed Lazaretto’s “Just One Drink” in between “Theme from Rawhide” and “Stand By Your Man” during the country bar scene in the Blues Brothers it would have been a knockout – that’s how cliché it is.

            As was the case with Blunderbuss, Jack White is at his best when he commits to his rock side. “Lazaretto” and “Would You Fight for My Love?” are exemplary in showcasing White’s musical integrity. They stay true to his sound as the White Stripes frontman but are still fresh because, when White is at his best, as he is on these two tracks, nobody does it better than him. However, with the approximate 50/50 split on Lazaretto between rock and country, it seems that White himself has trepidations about his musical explorations. It’s almost as if he knows that he does rock better than anything else, and he uses songs like “Lazaretto” and “Would You Fight for My Love?” as compensation for his lukewarm country efforts. These two tracks aren’t anything unique by his standards, however, and the fact that they’re the album’s highlights begs the question: Has Jack White said all he needs to say as a musician? We’ve seen it before with other hugely successful artists – Eminem is a prime example. Both of these men drastically altered the musical landscape for the better relatively early in their careers, but are evidently struggling to keep their relevance intact.

            Jack White will never falter so much as to put his career at risk – he’s too much of a legendary figure in modern rock for that to happen. His following is as strong as ever, and one can only bet that it will continue to grow as adolescent after adolescent discovers “Seven Nation Army” for the first time. However, the childish brashness that was so revitalizing and compelling in releases like “Elephant” and “White Blood Cells” is gone for the most part on White’s most recent effort. There’s no question that he’s matured as a musician and a songwriter, but, as has been the case with many artists before him, this maturation is not necessarily a good thing. 

Review: Parquet Courts, Sunbathing Animal

By Emmett H Robinson Smith

2013 was, for music, a year of grand-scale, bold statements from many artists. Deafheaven took widescreen black metal to new heights, prevalent alt bands Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire took courageous steps in new musical directions, the latter producing a whopping double album from their efforts. Daft Punk altered the entire mainstream EDM landscape with their disco-themed album, Beyoncé surprised nearly everybody with her sprawling, unconventional pop/R&B album, and artists such as Chance the Rapper and Kanye West rewrote the rules of hip-hop. Conversely, Parquet Courts’ 2013 album Light Up Gold was comparatively small in scope and unambitious in its goals. The album was a fast, 15-track, 33-minute listen in which Andrew Savage sung/talked about things like being stoned in a convenience store and the mundane contents of his pocket.

            Parquet Courts’ sound lies somewhere between early Green Day, the Strokes and Pixies. They demonstrate hints of garage punk but keep it light with their peppy guitars and honest, often funny lyrics. On Sunbathing Animal, their sound is more realized, in part due to the more realized nature of the actual songs. Seven of Light Up Gold’s tracks were under two minutes apiece, which created a jittery, coffee-fueled ADD listen – which is not necessarily a bad thing. Even the song titles were cheekily abbreviated: “Yr No Stoner” and “N Dakota” to name a couple. Sunbathing Animal offers only two songs whose length spans less than two minutes each, and the tracks sound more like actual compositions than anything on Light Up Gold. For example, “Black and White” begins with a simple guitar strumming. Drums and bass gradually crowd the sound, and eventually hand claps and what sounds like a washboard complete the percussive arrangement of the tune.  It’s a half-minute intro, but for a band once seemingly dedicated to many instruments starting simultaneously, these thirty seconds seem like a lifetime. Feedback-drenched guitar enters just after vocalist Andrew Savage begins to sing. More feedback is added after verse two, as is pure static. These additions may not seem like much, but here Parquet Courts sound more like songwriters than they have before.

            Sunbathing Animal’s biggest strength is its lyrics. The album’s centrepiece, “Instant Disassembly”, is a comparatively down-tempo seven-minute lyrical epic that sounds like it should be included as music for the ending credits of The Big Lebowski. It features Savage confessing about damn near everything: “Mamasita, tie me loose as I flee / Oh, it seems that you’ve got a spotlight / Cast on the dark side of me / I feel a pain so acute like I’m being impaled / And I can’t breathe, can’t breathe, it’s hard to inhale.” “Instant Disassembly” is full of weighty verses such as this, and its musical repetition advocates the significance of the song’s lyrics. It’s a song made for multiple listens, and a plethora of interpretations are no doubt welcome. Compared to songs about being “stoned and starving”, Parquet Courts reach new depths not only musically but lyrically as well.

            This is not to say that the band has turned into a self-serious group; the tunes are even more head-bobbing than before, and the tracklist is arranged to highlight the musical contrasts. Take the fast “Ducking & Dodging”, for example. A tense one-note bassline and a simple kick/snare pattern accompany Savage singing about, in his words, “fear and feeling that you can’t be yourself and that you don’t even really have a home.” Although the lyrics occupy a similar dark space to its predecessor “Instant Disassembly”, the musical contrast is blatant – especially once Savage sings “That key you’ve got won’t fit this lock no more” and a Ramones-y guitar riff kicks in. The album has plenty of pacing strategies and musical distinctions such as this, and it showcases the band thinking of an album as one piece of work rather than a collection of individual songs.

            Sunbathing Animal is more of an album, in the true sense of the word, than anything Parquet Courts has created before, and the result is satisfying. The songs cut deeper, and the pacing of the album enhances the musical differences between songs. The lyrics are the focus on the bulk of the album, but this attention to text does not detract from the catchy punk riffs that the band is known for. It’s a personal triumph for these guys, and for the band to take such big steps as songwriters here, one can’t help but wonder what Parquet Courts has up its sleeve for next time.

Metal Mondays with Corey Spetifore

Track Review: Wovenwar, "All Rise"

By Corey Spetifore

It is not often that a brand new metal band attracts a great deal of attention right out of the gate.

However, a certain supergroup out of San Diego, California is slashing that trend before the eyes of many and basking in the spotlight of pure, unadulterated metal.

The quartet of As I Lay Dying instrumentalists have joined forces with Oh, Sleeper vocalist Shane Blay to form Wovenwar, a tactful metal powerhouse that is effectively sweeping the modern metal scene. Brandishing a unique sound that challenges their numerous contemporaries, Wovenwar, formed under a year ago, has already promised the release of a full-length album this summer on Metal Blade Records. With expectation and skepticism mounting, the public has been treated to “All Rise”, the very first sample of the band’s craftsmanship. As their single has instantly nabbed chart positions on iTunes and is enjoying mainstream success, Wovenwar continues to perpetuate the hype surrounding them.

Produced by Bill Stevenson (As I Lay Dying, NOFX, Rise Against), “All Rise” shows no mercy upon the listener, unleashing a thundering double kick drum beat which backs up methodically chugging rhythm guitars and a blitzing, melodic guitar solo, recalling the ballsy shredding of 80’s metal; an assertive, full-throttle atmosphere is exuded, demanding the listener’s full attention. Following the explosive opening, the song quickly retreats from the fairly upbeat tempo it began with and utilizes half-time to introduce the verse, making way for the soaring, sung vocals of Mr. Blay himself. Although nowadays atypical to metal, the very presence of clean vocals immediately makes the song – and moreover, the genre – more accessible to a larger demographic without sacrificing any content. From the verse, the track enjoys a large yet seamless crescendo into a modulated chorus with a massive sound, with the beat switching back to opening tempo and the second guitar providing open-tapping texture over top of thriving power chords. This integration of a radically different second theme for a chorus shows adept concentration, conscious musicality and mostly, Wovenwar’s will to carve out a completely unique style for themselves; currently, no bands of the genre offer anything similar or remotely comparable to this sound, as elements of metalcore, heavy metal, post-hardcore and punk are blended together in razor-sharp production to form a colossal front. There is little respite during the track’s nearly 4 minute long duration, breaking shortly only for a fiery, rat-a-tat breakdown lead by snare fills before leading into the final chorus via an airy and open-structured bridge. For a debut effort from a “meeting of the minds” and from a musical standpoint, “All Rise” is greatly impressive and an absolute thrill to listen to. The contrast demonstrated in this single provides a marvelous sense of balance between power and restraint, showing you can be metal and musical, and leads us to believe that Wovenwar has only given us the smallest taste of the larger entrée expected later this summer.

Review: The Black Keys, Turn Blue

By Emmett H Robinson Smith

Since the release of El Camino, which turns three years old this coming December, Akron duo the Black Keys have been through a lot. Patrick Carney, the outspoken Keys drummer, found himself confronted on Twitter by millions of adolescent Justin Bieber fans for his words about the controversial pop star. Perhaps more significantly, however, Dan Auerbach, the arguable brains behind the Keys operation, went through a divorce, and it shows on the band’s new album Turn Blue. His lyrics on the LP are more full of “woman trouble” subject matter than ever. “Looking back on where we used to be / Everything was clear, but still I refused to see / Hearts began to rust / The diamond turned to dust” Auerbach admits on “Bullet in the Brain”. Indeed, blue is the operative mood on the bulk of the album’s tracks.

El Camino was the sound of a group struggling to find a balance between staying true to their roots as old-school blues-rock artists and bolstering their newfound popularity, mainly due to the excellent single “Tighten Up” from their sprawlingly diverse 2010 album Brothers. El Camino was a tight, unified, albeit safe, and at times tepid, collection of songs that leaned more towards the mainstream than the Keys ever had before: Auerbach called the album “too manicured” in a recent Rolling Stone interview. Thusly, it’s exciting to hear the duo explore new styles and instrumentation on their latest effort. The epic “Weight of Love” is the bold album opener, and it becomes clear almost immediately that new musical directions will be a feature. A whistling, ghostly organ and pinging bells help to create a lush, richly textured soundscape that complements the haunting melody of the chorus. The song’s sheer length – 6:50 – is significant in itself, as the Black Keys aren’t known for making tracks much longer than four minutes apiece.

Much of the credit for the musicality of Turn Blue can be given to Brian Burton, a.k.a. Danger Mouse, who has produced their last four albums to varying effect. On this project however, it sounds as though the visions of both parties have found a way to play off each other in a natural way. The classic blues riffs of the Keys’ earlier albums are still intact, but are made to sound fresh with spacey, echoing accompaniment. Take the title track, for instance. Auerbach’s bluesy riff is complemented with booming toms, crescendoing strings and a quickly repeating one-note bass line.  This is a prime example of the successful marriage between Burton’s and the Black Keys’ ideas.

Things do get sluggish in the middle of the album. “Year In Review” is an overly monochromatic throwaway which features Auerbach vaguely lamenting his women troubles with very general lines as a result: “You don't wanna know more/And you've been down this road before/So leave it alone/Just leave it alone”. The more serious problem here, though, is the monotony of the tune. The verse and chorus melody is on the same note, which, by the two-minute mark, becomes tiresome, and, worse, annoying. “It’s Up to You Now” inexplicably takes a turn for the lethargic worse after the up-tempo riff becomes exhausted. You can almost hear the Keys thinking, “okay, it’s getting boring. We should probably change it here”.

However, Turn Blue’s final batch of songs is strong. “Waiting on Words” is an old-school Who-like ballad, and Auerbach’s falsetto sounds gorgeous over the delicate chord progressions of the chorus. “In Our Prime” begins surprisingly stripped down compared to many other tracks on the album, and there are hints of blues guitar that creep into a groove which has the Beatles written all over it. However, the song builds into a blazing guitar-and-organ-solo epic, complete with a string section and mallets. Auerbach’s lyrics are particularly strong here, too, and carry a nostalgic tone that plays strongly to the placement of the song as one of the album’s final tracks: “Like every lover hovers in my mind / We made our mark when we were in our prime / The house, it burned, but nothing there was mine / We had it all when we were in our prime”, he sings.

One of the most musically courageous and exciting releases of 2013, Kanye West’s Yeezus, was for the most part an assault of harsh, industrial “hip-hop”, to use the term very loosely. However, the final track took listeners by surprise: In the context of an album so dedicated to pushing the boundaries of conventional hip-hop, the last song, “Bound 2”, was a ray of light at the end of the tunnel. It was classic Kanye, featuring his staple soul-sampling which made him so popular in the first place, as well as his trademark simple, wry lyrics. This phenomenon is mirrored in Turn Blue. With their most musically explorative collection to date, they end the album with a blast of retro, balls-out rock n’ roll in “Gotta Get Away”. It’s El Camino again, but tighter, more singable, and more cruise-down-the-highway-with-your-speakers-blasting, which makes for a hugely effective closer for a work that is largely a textural “headphones album”. It’s a satisfying ending that tells us that the Keys aren’t taking themselves too seriously, and that they still know how to rock in the classic sense of the word.

The Black Keys have created something special with Turn Blue, with a huge help from producer Brian Burton. The arrangements are rich and beguiling, and Auerbach’s lyrics shine through with this accompaniment. Despite some missteps, the duo has taken a bold step in a new direction without sacrificing their roots. The Black Keys are back.