Thursday, November 24, 2005

In the key of black

Yeah, the Black Keys have won acres of good press - the punchy blues rock duo from Akron, Ohio have buckets of grit, swagger and soul. The audience that sold out Barrymore's Nov. 18 was certainly enthused by their performance - and deservedly so. Personally, I still give the evening's honours to their tourmate Nathaniel Mayer, with a honourable mention to Ottawa's own Weapons of Mass Seduction. Strange as it seems, for me the Keys' tight show worked against them - I wanted something a little looser, sloppier, crazier ... and compared to Mayer their interaction with the audience was restrained. Ah, I'm done whining - it was good show by any fair measure.

As you can see from this picture of Daniel Auerbach, the smoke machine was working overtime.



Patrick Carney gave his kit a very solid thumping.



Dan goes wild!



Pat goes psychedelic!



Keys in the smoke ...



And facing off.



The view from behind the mixing board.



They gave us a good hour of their time - and at a very reasonable rate, too.

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