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To The Black Keys’ credit, there’s lyrical resignation but not much bitterness, the prose forming a sliver of the healing ritual.
What would you do if you had some unexpected time off. Fishing? Cocktails by the beach? Road trip?
The Black Keys chose door number one, and when that did happen they made another record.
Things weren’t quite as straightforward as that though, they never are.
Burned by those they trusted, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney in point of fact found the nightmare chain of events played out in front of everybody like a bad breakup.
Having released their twelfth album Ohio Players in early 2024 – featuring collaborations with Beck and Noel Gallagher – the duo not unreasonably had plans for a world tour to support it, only to be engulfed first in ridicule for poor ticket sales and then controversy when they announced a show associated with cryptocurrency.
In the fallout the pair sacked their management and PR team, issued some (now deleted to avoid legal repercussions) social media posts giving their side of the fiasco and then spoke about the worrying vertical integration that sits beneath the modern music industry’s surface.
In a year of bad vibes the only outlet the pair found mutually stimulating was to go back into the studio and cook up the next chapter.
Carney has summed up his feelings towards the whole period as like, ‘A punch in the face’, while Auerbach dolefully uses an even simpler term: “Shit happens”. No Rain No Flowers is its offspring.
If a problem shared is one whose gravity diminishes, then there seems to have been no problem at all in the making; the album’s title was arrived at courtesy of veteran writer Rick Nowells, whose work is as contemporary as Lana Del Rey and as ancient as Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth.
Nowells’ contribution is No Rain No Flowers’ titular opener, a wispy, grown-up slice of what used to be known as adult orientated rock when there were still things about called radio stations.
To everyone’s credit, there’s lyrical resignation but not much bitterness, the prose obviously forming a sliver of the healing ritual. (If you’re a lover of intrigue and heresy, the boys even let EDM savant Diplo give it what is a muscular and effective remix.)
The previous 12 months has been a rich one for The Black Keys’ critics, but the blues rock of their classic 2011 release El Camino hasn’t been completely abandoned, as Down To Nothing and A Little Too High prove.
They’re just appetizers though in the face of the butt kickin’ psychedelics of Man On A Mission; a dirty, gritty ditty with a hook-filled chorus that threatens to aggressively gobble up all the sugar-coated toppings around it.
With a nimble sub 40-minute duration and 11 track running order, No Rain No Flowers has been clearly tooled to deliver a glossy payload and mostly wins, a lacklustre jaunt with Daniel Tashian (see also Kacey Musgraves) via The Night Before being the surprising exception.
Even with the limited space, the joint spreading of wings conjures up times which should make looking in the mirror easier.
Here, The Roots’ keyboard maestro Scott Storch helps turn Babygirl into a poppy, sub boogie-woogie stomp that’s much more fun than maybe it should be, whilst the rolling EWF funk of Kiss It and especially the finger popping soul of All My Life are the products of a Mojo refound.
The Black Keys took their licks and decided the best sort of vacation was a working one.
No Rain No Flowers takes revenge on the man the only way they know how, and it sounds as sweet as it probably tastes.