Black Keys don't miss a pounding beat

November 18, 2005|Globe Correspondent

Rare as it is to come across a band in its prime, at the flaming maximum of its powers, there's no mistaking it when it happens: A sense of inevitability, of necessity even, converges with a sense of surprise, and a fierce, ancient gladness. Wednesday night at Avalon, Ohio's Black Keys reminded a packed house what it means to be on. The duo of Patrick Carney (drums) and Dan Auerbach (guitar/vocals) has rewired the blues of the Mississippi Delta with the increased voltage of garagey fuzz-rock, and the intensity with which they drive this risky piece of circuitry has to be seen to be believed.

Visually the Black Keys show is stripped to the bones. Carney's four-piece kit is set up in the foreground, side-on, so that the crowd gets a sweating cross section of him as he works. Auerbach's two Marshall amps, one large, one small, are similarly averted, angled away from the front of the stage -- by the end of the night they have the enigmatic presence of a pair of Copper Age megaliths.

Musically there is a high-temperature melding of the classic and the modern. The stooped and frowning Carney plays like a demon whumping the bottom of his caldron, in the tradition of the heaviest '90s indie bands such as Jesus Lizard and Shellac, while Auerbach, his Telecaster high on his chest, spurts Hendrix-isms or toils through the weird raga grind of bluesman Junior Kimbrough. Together they sound as thick and loose as vintage Cream, if Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker had somehow inhaled equal portions of Jack Bruce: The lack of a bassist, in other words, is not missed.

Auerbach, who for stage patter contents himself with ''Thank you! Thank YOU!" or ''That's Patrick on the drum kit there!," is a fascinating blend of bravado and humility. The rugged plaint of his voice runs along a previously undiscovered rock-historical fault line that connects Little Feat's Lowell George to Kurt Cobain, while his playing somehow holds the band's sound in a deep-pocketed groove even as it blasts into lead-guitar heaven.

Now on their third album for the legendary Fat Possum label -- home to the toughest, crankiest musicians of the North Mississippi hill country -- Black Keys have tightened and muscled up considerably since the ramshackle stylings of their debut, ''The Big Come Up." But the basics haven't changed: the clangor of the guitar, the skeletal drum patterns. A cover of the Beatles' ''She Said" made Lennon's tripped-out lament (''You're making me feel like I've never been born") sound like a backwoods proverb. Count yourself lucky if you were there.