Right around Memorial Day 2024, the Black Keys quietly announced that they were cancelling the North American leg of their International Players tour. It was a shock to fans, of course, though it soon became known that the shows had been booked in arenas and tickets were a minimum of $100\u2026 and not many people were buying them.<\/p>\n
Now, the Keys are a good band, but they haven\u2019t played arenas in a very long time, and Ohio Players <\/i>didn\u2019t exactly burn up the charts or anything on its April release. The natural inclination would be to blame the album, though to me it seems more like bad planning on the part of an overzealous management firm that couldn\u2019t read the room.<\/p>\n
But, to be fair, Ohio Players <\/i>is not really an album on which to build an arena tour, despite all the special guests that drop by. Beck joins the album as basically a third member, playing on and co-writing seven of the 14 songs, while Jessie J and Noel Gallagher drop by as well. The songs are firmly within the Keys\u2019 established sound, but almost no feeling of the blues is here other than the melancholy that tends to color most of Dan Auerbach\u2019s singing and \u201cI Forgot To Be Your Lover.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis Is Nowhere\u201d is the band\u2019s worst album opener, a very repetitive track that goes nowhere; better is the efficient stomp of \u201cYou\u2019ll Pay\u201d and the psychedelic mood that colors \u201cOnly Love Matters.\u201d But as the disc plays out, it has a feeling of trying just a little too hard to have fun, of convincing everyone that this is where you really want to be, even though that\u2019s clearly not the case. \u201cPlease me \u2019til I\u2019m satisfied,\u201d Auerbach orders one unlucky partygoer about midway through the album, and you feel like maybe people should just go home and sober up.<\/p>\n
The rap verses tacked on to \u201cCandy And Her Friends\u201d and \u201cPaper Crown\u201d are awkward and out of place, as is the pop reach of \u201cBeautiful People (Stay High),\u201d adding to the desperation-party vibe. \u201cRead \u2019Em and Weep,\u201d toward the end, comes as close as \u201cYou\u2019ll Pay\u201d to capturing that Keys sound that they do so well, which is part of what made their 2022 album Dropout Boogie <\/i>a fun, efficient listen. Oh, and to those of a certain age who remember the Ohio Players, there\u2019s no funk to be found in these songs. Shame.<\/p>\n
So three good songs does not a successful arena album make, and I think fans realized that. Time will tell if they come back to play smaller stadiums with a more devoted fan base, and in concert some of these songs will pop. But it\u2019s a telling sign that the band feels the need to bring in all these guests to try to enliven the proceedings and it still doesn\u2019t work. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":35030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8817],"rating":[11204],"class_list":["post-46905","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-black-keys","rating-rating-c-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46905"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46905"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}