The Black Keys' new album, El Camino, was released yesterday to great critical acclaim and plenty of celebrating all around. The band was on The Colbert Report last night, performed "Lonely Boy" and a web-exclusive of "Gold on the Ceiling"—all of which you can watch here—and performs on the Late Show with David Letterman tonight. Reuters calls El Camino "stunning." The Washington Post calls the band "exhilarating." MTV includes El Camino on its list of the 20 Best Albums of 2011, calling it "positively brilliant." Stereogum says, "There isn’t a single weak track." Consequence of Sound gives the album four stars and finds it "very nearly the Platonic ideal of rock and roll."
The Black Keys' new album, El Camino, was released yesterday to great critical acclaim and plenty of celebrating all around. The band performed on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central last night—which you can watch below—and continues the televised music-making with a performance on the Late Show with David Letterman on CBS tonight.
On last night's Colbert Report appearance, band mates Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney spoke with Stephen Colbert about the new album and the duo's hugely successful year, including multiple Grammy Awards for their last record, Brothers, putting them on, in Colbert's words, a "rocketship to the moon." Watch the interview here:
The band performed the first single off El Camino, "Lonely Boy," which you can watch here:
While at the Colbert studio, the band also gave a web-exclusive performance of the El Camino track "Gold on the Ceiling." Watch it here:
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The critical response continues with the album described as "stunning" in a Reuters review. "The Black Keys have previously been known for a blues-based sound, which put their roots in the Mesozoic era, by modern standards," writes reviewer Chris Willman. "But with their stunning new El Camino, they hark back to a different epoch of dinosaur rock, sounding like … T. Rex." Willman confirms that the band has "gone glam—gloriously. The two-piece outfit’s formerly stripped-down core sound has been thickened up into something much more akin to Led Zeppelin’s version of the blues, but with handclaps and female backing vocals." Read the complete review at reuters.com.
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The Washington Post calls the band "exhilarating" in its review of El Camino. "Previous Black Keys releases have dwelled on the themes of love, betrayal and existential worry that have long haunted American roots music," writes Post reviewer Timothy Bracy. "El Camino, the band’s seventh full-length release, finds it returning to this terrain with no diminishment of inspiration ... As with AC/DC, a group with whom the Black Keys have something of a spiritual kinship, subtle variations on a few unimpeachable musical themes help keep the band consistently exhilarating." Read the complete review at washingtonpost.com.
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MTV includes El Camino on its list of the 20 Best Albums of 2011. The band goes "full-throttle, tearing through 11 hard-riffing, deep-boogying tracks in something like 38 minutes ... and, on tracks like 'Lonely Boy,' 'Money Maker' and 'Little Black Submarines,' manages to get positively brilliant too—in a George Thorogood-meets-the Cramps kind of way, of course." Read more at mtv.com.
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Stereogum names El Camino its Album of the Week, describing the band as "zero-pretension rock monsters" who, on the new album, "did what they came here to do." El Camino "is the best Black Keys album because it’s the purest," says Stereogum reviewer Tom Breihan. "There isn’t a single weak track, everything starts and ends with the same pummeling throb, and every riff gets a chance to bounce around in your head for a few minutes." Read more at stereogum.com.
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PopMatters rates the album a nine out of ten. "It’s been a steady rise to the top, but the release of El Camino may finally put the Black Keys in the plush and padded golden throne they’ve been deserving of for the better part of the last decade," raves reviewer Jonathan Kosakow. "Their sound still holds the purity, the grunge, and the heartfelt decadent pounding it did on their first albums, but it’s evolved into a blistering machine that destroys foundations with nearly every note."
Kosakow goes on to suggest of the new album and its predecessor: "Playing this album and last year’s Brothers in succession will show you a band capable and striving not only to reach in different directions, but also surefooted enough to take risks of all sorts, confident that those decisions will pay off in the end." He concludes that "the Black Keys are only gaining steam, and the engine is getting more powerful with each turn."
Read the complete review at popmatters.com.
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Consequence of Sound gives the album four stars. "El Camino distills its predecessor’s high-octane fumes and high-profile influences into very nearly the Platonic ideal of rock and roll. Like the wood-paneled minivan that adorns the album cover, each track is big, brash, and classic," writes CoS reviewer Harley Brown. "The Black Keys are successful because they see their icons and raise them, amping up the classics to breathtaking speed with the lo-fi snarl that made them famous in the first place."
Brown concludes: "The duo deserves a victory lap after ascending from four-track recordings in Carney’s basement to selling out amphitheaters and headlining festivals, all while maintaining the same DIY aesthetic and work ethic since their Big Come Up. And what better vehicle for their success than El Camino?"
Read the review at consequenceofsound.net.
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To pick up a copy of El Camino, head to iTunes, Amazon, The Black Keys store, and the Nonesuch Store, where CDs and LPs are now 34% off and include high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s of the album at checkout.
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