Something borrowed, something new.
The Black Keys have spent the better part of a decade testing how far their formula will stretch; Peaches!, their fourteenth record, answers the opposite question, which is how little they need in order to sound entirely like themselves. It is a covers album, their second in five years, assembled quickly in circumstances the band has since made no secret of; it was cut while Auerbach’s father was dying, and it carries, beneath its swagger, the unmistakable economy of music made to occupy grieving hands. The title is apt in a way the band may not have fully intended; the sleeve, a William Eggleston photograph of a sun-struck roadside sign whose maker’s eye also fronted Delta Kream, the band’s last set of borrowed songs, makes the argument before a note sounds. These are peaches picked from other people’s trees, and the pleasure of the record lies less in what is grown than in what is gathered.
It is the disguise that bears mentioning first. Nothing here announces itself as homage; on a first, unguarded listen the record reads as something sunnier than its Mississippi and Nashville lineage has any right to sound. A run of jangling, wah-lit road songs that summon flared denim and swimming pools and the long westward emptiness of Route 66: not the juke joints the material actually comes from. That misreading is not a failure of attention but the record’s triumphant achievement. The band has absorbed its sources so completely that ten songs scattered across the blues stop sounding borrowed and begin sharing one weather. What had been homage became habitat; what had been a covers session became a place in its own right.
Within that weather system the detail is frequently superb. “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire” opens on a wah figure that worries at a note before the band falls into a loose country shuffle, and it sets the template the record keeps faith in: acoustic drums, saturated guitar, a low reed colour drifting under the choruses, and short instrumental breaks that think harder than the verses around them. Those interludes are the record’s connective tissue; on “It’s a Dream,” the swampiest and most deliberately disoriented track, an intentionally detuned line and a closing rattlesnake shimmer push the song toward something genuinely strange, while on “Tell Me You Love Me” the players enter in open rhythmic disagreement before resolving, with singular wit, into the song they were fated to be.
If there is a reservation it is a small and honest one; within so assured a palette, a couple of tracks simply carry less weight than their neighbours. Certainly pleasant on their own terms but slightly recessive beside the strongest material. The back half holds firm regardless; “You Got to Lose” returns to the nonchalant, swampier register that suits the band best, and “She Does It Right” survives an unremarkable vocal almost entirely on the strength of its playing, though “Fireman Ring the Bell” sustains a fine cowboy figure a little past the point of diminishing return. “Nobody but You” closes things mellow and well-teased; an unspectacular end, and most positively the right one for this record.
What lingers is that opening impression, now slightly haunted. Heard cold, Peaches! feels like a road trip through a surviving, half-mythic America. The vestiges of a past country still standing against the flattening pressure of the present, and the Eggleston cover, dusk light on a faded sign with fallen fruit scattered across the roof below it only sharpens the feeling. It is perhaps a culturally palatable image for the nation to digest; an emotional exhortation to grief, hinting at the idea that what once was never truly leaves so long as one cares to remember. Heard with its origins in view, the consistency of tone is interpreted less as habit than as conviction; a band narrowing deliberately to the one register that has never failed them, and trusting it to carry a record they know to be solid. It is not their most ambitious album, and it does not try to be; it is nonetheless their most natural one, and the fact that naturalness here means borrowed songs played without strain, fruit gathered rather than grown, is the most honest thing about it.
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