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The Black Keys new album, Turn Blue, is big.
It's not the sort of exponential up-scaling from Magic Potion, the band's last record as a legit two-piece, to the Danger-Mousified Attack & Release. But from frontman Dan Auerbach's sticky jam on the opener, "Weight of Love," it's a deeper, lower, louder album than its immediate predecessor, El Camino.
The Moda Center is also big. A little bigger than was needed for the band, at least on Halloween, when so much free entertainment can be had in Portland. Many of the side seats on the upper deck were curtained off, and a healthy portion of the remaining seats were unoccupied.
And yet, the arena proved a pretty good fit as the Keys newest material stole the show, with the title track, "Fever" and "Gotta Get Away" getting among the best reception of the night. Other four-piece era tracks El Camino's "Little Black Submarines"—the night's closer, opened acoustic, then dramatically electrified during a mid-song blackout—and the hit singles "Gold on the Ceiling" and "Lonely Boy" also winning loud cheers. Local-ish singer-songwriter Richard Swift, a sometimes Shin who works out of Cottage Grove, the truck-stop town south of Eugene, seemed especially helpful on the latter, assisting Keys drummer Pat Carney into the night's best groove.
Throughout, Auerbach's guitar tone remained as enticing as ever. He could play pretty much anything—even, it turns out, disposable VH1 pop like "A Girl Like You"—and make it sound like an Exile outtake.
There were a few misfires, too.
Well, no one seemed especially into the band's lone Big Come Up track, "Leaving Trunk." And an otherwise stellar "Gotta Get Away" was marred by an awkward bit of stagecraft, as the roadie brought out a standing-height lap steel for a 30-second solo, then hustled it off stage, a ill-fitting bit of preciousness for any bluesman. Also—and I may be mistaken, but perception is as important as reality here—it appeared Auerbach was whistle-syncing the start of "Tighten Up." (Is there anything worse than whistle-syncing? No, there is not. Whistle-syncing is the worst thing any rock musician can do on stage.)
I doubt most of the crowd—certainly not the middle-schooler in the row in front of me, who was sitting in a haze of weed smoke from the double-daters two rows in front of me—took note. Then again, those miscues are the sort of things that confirm the biases of record store clerks who play in "twinklecore" bands.
But that's the thing about the arena-sized manifestation of the Keys, and the arena-ready album they're touring in support of: Maybe they're not too big to fail, but they're certainly big enough to get friendly odds.
WWeek 2015
