The Black Keys - Delta Kream ALBUM REVIEW

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An old car on a Black Keys album cover. What can go wrong?


I’ve never really the biggest fan of cover albums. I don’t have anything against covers, though, they can be very fun. One of my favorite songs of all time is Frank Ocean’s cover of The Isley Brothers’ “At Your Best (You Are Love)” from his album, Endless. It mainly has to do with the ‘album’ concept of covers that I don’t really get. Looking at more recent examples, Weezer put out a covers album a few years back, their Teal Album, and it was fun and certainly was technically sound. At the completely other end of the quality spectrum, Glen Danzig put out an Elvis covers album. Sounds decent on paper, right? It was awful. Everything about it was bad, Danzig’s vocals and the production included. Hell, I don’t even pay attention to mixing on albums, but good god the mixing was bad. Now, we have a covers album from Ohio duo The Black Keys, which is renditions of blues rock songs from blues-rock artists that were around in the 50s and 60s like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbraugh. I have a good history with The Black Keys, at least liking all of their albums, so I’m curious to see how this goes. Let’s see how Delta Kream turned out.

I really don’t wanna use the term ‘dad rock’ as a bad thing, but man, this just felt like a slog. Now, I know what you might be thinking. ‘Come on, Corda. These are covers of songs from the 50s and 60s. You didn’t grow up in that generation when blues-rock was at its peak. You know nothing about it!’ I’m aware, and coincidently, I forgot this album was coming out this past Friday, and when I saw the tracklist and noticed they were all covers, I decided to listen to the original versions, and they were great! On Delta Kream, though, it feels very Black Keys. That’s usually not a bad thing, I love the both of them, but these covers that mainly rely on nostalgia for the past just didn’t do anything for me. I don’t have any nostalgia for these songs because I didn’t grow up with it. More power to artists like the Black Keys to push these songs to a new audience, but this really wasn’t for me.

So, yeah. Delta Kream is a covers album. This doesn’t disprove the technical talents of The Black Keys or diminish their impact on music, but this just felt very safe and boring. As I said, it sounded like a Black Keys album.


My Opinion Is Irrelevant/10


Listen here

YouTube Music




Delta Kream is a Nonesuch release.

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