Albums by this artist

The Big Come Up (2002)

The Black Keys

The Big Come Up

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» JEFF GRAY | STAFF WRITER

The Black Keys The Big Come Up Alive, 2002 RiYL: John Lee Hooker, The White Stripes, Canned Heat

Listen to The Black Keys' The Big Come Up, and you'll think you're listening to a musty old Mississippi blues group, recently dug up and thrust into long-overdue prominence by some enterprising archivist with a tape recorder. But you'll be wrong. They're really just two kids from the noted blues mecca of Akron, Ohio. In any case, beneath singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach's gravelly voice and guitar licks that sound like he's playing with a really old amplifier, The Big Come Up shows off more hard rock and funk than a purely traditional Delta blues player could ever muster.

The group comprises just Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney, but the album's sound is seldom too thin -- Auerbach is proficient at the folk-blues technique of hitting a bass line while playing his lead. In fact, the album is better for the absence of the slickly-produced sound and orchestration found on hits by latter-day blues prodigies like Kenny Wayne Shepard and Johnny Lang. It's Auerbach's voice, though, that takes The Big Come Up from merely head-boppin' into the realm of memorable. It's a genuine blues-rock voice, raspy and deep, out of place for an Ohio kid in his twenties (I'd love to hear him talk, and I wonder if people do double-takes when they hear that voice emanating from his lips). Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughn would have burned the world down with Auerbach's voice.

The guitar work is also more than satisfactory, driven by fuzzy fingerstyle licks rather than virtuoso Clapton- or Hendrix-style solos. It's at its best on "Breaks," a track with blaring, bent electric squawks that will jerk you out of whatever you're doing and command your attention. "Heavy Soul" has some mean riffing, too, as Auerbach's thumping notes more than make up for some rather tepid drumming. On "Busted," the album's opening track, Auerbach's finger-picking quickly devolves into a straight funk riff, making it the perfect eye-opener.

The Big Come Up fares moderately well with covers. The band ventures into one blues standard, Junior Kimbrough's "Do the Rump," with great success, picking up the pace and the distortion from Kimbrough's version, a forgettable but entertaining stomp. (Kimbrough, by the way, really was "discovered" by an archivist with a four-track). The band also chose to cover The Beatles' classic "She Said, She Said," and while Auerbach's pipes make for an interesting update to the song, it doesn't quite work. The marriage of Beatledom and Black Keys blues isn't as good as either one of the elements on their own.

And if The Big Come Up is only satisfactory on covers, it's less successful when it ventures into peppy blues-rock stomps. Both "Countdown" and "Yearnin'" are rollickin' good-time tunes that swing right along (think The White Stripes' "Hotel Yorba" with better musicianship), but neither are as interesting as the plain old nasty funky songs that surround them. And plain old nasty funk is something that never grows outdated.

JEFF GRAY | Jeff Gray used to be an important mover and shaker in Chicago, but gave all that up to live on a beach in rural Hawaii. You'll notice him if you're there, he's the one who's very tall and a little bit sunburned. His musical tastes tend towards the mainstream -- Phish, Radiohead, The Strokes -- but he'll argue to the death that those bands are mainstream because they're 100% awesome. Jeff's always on the lookout for the next great pop song, tidbits about Michigan football, and 80's action movies on cable.