It’s been a long road back to Manchester for The Black Keys. When they last played the Arena, in December of 2012, they were riding the crest of a wave, with two shrewdly melodic albums in a row having taken them from bluesy obscurity to rock and roll stardom.
Few would have expected, then, that it’d take them over a decade to return. Fate intervened, though.
They were due to play in 2014, in support of Turn Blue, an anaemic album that saw them fall into a familiar trap for bands who make it big. Emboldened by the meteoric rise afforded to them by 2010’s Brothers and 2011’s El Camino, they rushed back into the studio to try to strike while the iron was hot, only to turn out an uninspired attempt to recapture the magic of the records that came before.
Read more: Join the FREE Manchester Evening News WhatsApp community
Then, as they heated up for the tour, drummer Patrick Carney dislocated his shoulder in a surfing accident. From there, The Black Keys drifted.
Carney and his bandmate, singer and guitarist Dan Auerbach, both retreated to the studio and took production work, the latter working with big names like Lana Del Rey. Only in 2019 did they reconvene, rediscovering their mojo on the Twin Peaks-inspired “Let’s Rock”, before paying tribute to their influences with an album of hill country covers, Delta Kream, in 2021, and then the Captain Beefheart-indebted Dropout Boogie last year.
All of which is to say that The Black Keys have again found their rhythm. Before them, though, came a storied support slot from Spoon, the band that the review-aggregating website Metacritic proclaimed the greatest ever a few years ago, on the basis of their popularity with critics.
They have a kinship with the Keys, too, an innate bluesiness that manifests itself in the raspy vocal of frontman Britt Daniel and the deep groove of drummer Jim Eno. ‘Do You’, ‘The Underdog’ and a swaggering ‘Rent I Pay’ are among the highlights.
The Keys, meanwhile, show up with a point to prove. As if to reinforce how far they’ve come, the duo are flanked by four multi-instrumentalists who bring a fleshed-out richness to the songs;
This is not the version of The Black Keys that played sweaty clubs for years. Something emphasised further by the fact that Auerbach, once scruffy and hirsute, appears to have had a Hollywood makeover and now looks more like Tim Roth than Tim Roth.
They open pointedly with the freewheeling ‘I Got Mine’, the same track that opened up mosh pits when they closed with it in 2012. From there, it’s a confident stroll through the back catalogue.
There's the raw blues of deep cuts like ‘Your Touch’ and ‘Have Love, Will Travel’ sitting impressively neatly alongside Dropout Boogie material, with ‘Your Team Is Looking Good’ the pick of the new songs.
The real highlights, though, come courtesy of the two records that propelled them to arena status, Brothers and El Camino. There’s call-and-response singalongs (‘Howlin’ for You’), lighters-in-the-air moments of reflection (‘Everlasting Light’) and, on the modern classic ‘Gold on the Ceiling’, thrilling riffery.
The two-track encore confirms that The Black Keys are at their best when they’re people-pleasers; ‘Little Black Submarines’, with its quiet, atmospheric opening half and monumentally noisy second, is like a rock opera in miniature, while the irresistibly funky ‘Lonely Boy’ moves the crowd more than anything that came before it.
It’s been an arduous path back to UK arenas for the band, one littered with left turns and setbacks. The wait was worth it, though.
