It's remarkable how captivating the Black Keys manage to be, considering that Magic Potion—like much of the band's catalogue—consists solely of Dan Auerbach's scathing, strutting one-line blues licks matched with Patrick Carney's slyly abrasive, shuffling percussion. This is ingeniously simple music: raw, unhinged and devilishly cool.
The success of the music relies greatly upon a strong cohesiveness the two musicians clearly have among one another, making them seem much more than the sum of their parts. They bend and sway together, feeding off each other's passionate nuances to staggering results. The title captures it best—Magic Potion is like a hypnotically intense, transcendent soul trip, full of howling pain and ecstatic lust to last one well through the midnight hour.
By now the Black Keys have distanced themselves from the comparisons to bands such as the White Stripes which ran rampant several years ago, having proven their take on garage-blues to be a much more pure, visceral and consistent embodiment of the form. The spirit of bluesmen like Junior Kimbrough, whom they paid homage to with the Chulahoma EP earlier this year, looms large over the murky, heady sound of rootsy southern blues, channelled full-throttle through the amps of two rock musicians from Ohio.
On ""Just a Little Heat,"" they have the chops to mimic Led Zeppelin, toying around with a variation of the riff from ""Little Loving Maid,"" then turning the song into a blazing triumph in their own right. Auerbach, whose voice falls somewhere between Gregg Allman and Howlin' Wolf, sings on the slippery swing of the chorus, ""It's in my head now, I can't let go / No matter what you say, 'cause I already know,"" with the sense of understated bravado and spiritual charisma that lends just the right bit of attitude to much of Magic Potion.
The Black Keys are great at throwing quiet, reflective moments seamlessly into their songs. The taut, gut-wrenching stomp of ""Strange Desire,"" for example, unravels after a couple minutes to reveal a blissful, wafting solo, one of the few overdubs on the disc, which eventually spirals off into nothingness. In general, Auerbach isn't afraid to give his guitar equal time and attention as the vocals, letting it expand, drift and evolve as if it was a second voice, all the while keeping up the integrity of the rhythm and, more importantly, the ever-present groove.
Listening to the Black Keys can often feel like witnessing an excellent garage band at work in rehearsal. The photos in the sleeve—various shots of them playing/recording in a basement—suggest this, as does the music, which sounds effortlessly impromptu, and comes complete with minor imperfections and flubs that strengthen the tangible, down-home nature of the songs.
Their sheer ability to make simple blues vibrant, compelling and very much their own makes the Black Keys probably the most relevant blues-rock band today. And if that statement doesn't sound like a huge claim, it only emphasizes the importance of bands like them to carry the torch in a time when the genre has been all but forgotten.
