The Singles Jukebox

What, no gold in the pic? Not even a lousy Instagram filter? For shame, nostalgists, for shame…

[Video][Website]
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Brad Shoup: Damn these terrible, hardworking gentlemen: they’ve written the best Gomez song in ten years. It’s a glammy stomper with fuzzed-out organ, laissez-faire handclaps, and the sighing harmonies my British boys do so well. Plus, the best, yearningest, most psyched-out melody the duo has concocted yet. I may have to break my annual festival ritual of walking by the Keys to get to the funnel cake.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Differs from the Keys’ past work in that you’re bugged not by which blues but which psychedelic rock tracks they’re slickly ripping off. The latter, at least, isn’t so problematic. And those trippy harmonies, sung with the timbre of slide guitars, aren’t problems of any sort. 
[7]

Anthony Easton: I am still convinced that The Black Keys are for those people who use “rock” as a verb, but my tail feathers shake a bit when they play. And sometimes they stumble on a riff that reminds me of ’80s ZZ Top, and that’s enough.
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Iain Mew: They scratch in the sand, everything tastes nice, but I wish that they would scream and bawl and let themselves go a bit more. 
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Jonathan Bogart: What if the White Stripes, instead of playing games with androgyny, formalism, narratives of competence and incompetence, and the American myth of the crackpot genius, had just been a couple of bros playing 70s blues-rock? What if that was all a lot of people ever wanted the White Stripes to be?
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Alfred Soto: Sounds like the kind of request a fleabag motel gets from a john — and you just might hear “Spirit in the Sky” too if he’s lucky enough to bring iPod speakers.
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Jonathan Bradley: Shamefully true: I first discovered blues I could love via Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World. When Seymour played Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman,” I heard a music not made of tasteful guitar licks but one that moved and bled the way rap and soul and funk did. I did my homework and ventured beyond indie film soundtracks, but I never found anything to like about the blues music that valued virtuosity over rhythm; the Eric Claptons and Jimmy Pages of the world still leave me cold. The Black Keys had one album on which it felt like their blues rock understood that the music was for head-nodding, not air-soloing; 2008’s Attack and Release was thick and fluid and, in a curious way, could nestle on an iTunes playlist alongside a Mannie Fresh production. Since then, however, they’ve found a niche for themselves for all the youth of today longing for a Bachman-Turner Overdrive of their very own. There’s a guitar solo and a boogie that, I guess, takes care of business.
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Andrew Casillas: Well, at least the video’s ambitious.
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