The Black Keys Ohio Players Review: A Crowded House

Even during their early 2010s commercial peak, when outside producers, pop-funk influences, and expanded instrumentation transformed them into a genuine mainstream act, the Black Keys’s songs were still full of empty space. Listening to “Tighten Up” or “Lonely Boy” today, it’s striking how spare they sound. They’re slick but not overproduced. There’s not a single extraneous element, enabling the hooks to hammer home with maximum efficiency and giving the songs’ indelible grooves plenty of room to breathe.

The same can’t be said for the band’s 12th studio album, Ohio Players, which is so overstuffed with guest musicians that Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney are often swallowed whole. For the most part, this isn’t an issue of principle so much as practical listenability. While a large ensemble approach is certainly compatible with the album’s funk, hip-hop, and R&B-inflected stylings, the mixing and mastering on tracks like “Don’t Let Me Go” or “Only Love Matters” tends to blend everything together into an over-compressed sonic mash rather than give each instrument its own space in the mix.

One wonders about the purpose of a Black Keys album on which Auerbach and Carney are at times barely audible. “Please Me (Till I’m Satisfied)” opens with the latter pounding out a frenetic jungle beat before the former joins in with roiling blasts of fuzz guitar, and the moment stands out for actually sounding like the Black Keys, even if the track never turns into anything beyond a standard-issue garage rocker.

With Auerbach and Carney constantly jostling with their guests for prominence in the mix, it sounds at times like they’re mere session musicians. “I Forgot to Be Your Lover,” for example, is a faithful cover of the William Bell and Booker T. Jones-penned Stax classic that’s right in Auerbach’s wheelhouse as a singer, but his performance has to fight to be heard alongside gloppy, overloud strings and squelching guitar. Compare this version to tender and warm original recording and you just might find yourself going off on a Neil Young-esque rant about modern studio techniques.

A couple of tracks even sound A.I.-generated, none more so than the shockingly cynical “Beautiful People (Stay High),” which feels like an attempt to reverse engineer the brief era when the music in every car commercial either ripped off or actually was a song from Brothers or El Camino. The opening riff, in fact, is sampled from a glorified stock music track by film and advertising composer Richard Mead. Throw in a particularly inane chorus that’s repeated ad nauseam and Insert Lifestyle Brand Here has the perfect soundtrack to their next ad campaign.

What’s frustrating is that Ohio Players boasts some great hooks beneath the mire. With its great, fuzzy bassline and breezy melody, opener “This Is Nowhere,” one of the album’s whopping seven Beck co-writes, is blissfully funky—so long as you’re willing to forgive the egregious string of cheap rhymes in the first verse (“alligator tears” meet “discount beers”). Noel Gallagher’s influence shines through on the jangly, bittersweet “On the Game,” while the slinky, quietly sinister groove of “Candy and Her Friends,” featuring a guest appearance by Memphis rapper Lil Noid, is one of the few tracks on the album that doesn’t feel too busy.

Those and a few other songs on the album showcase some of the Black Keys’s best traits: their eclecticism, their melodicism, and their funkiness. The less-is-more principle that drove their best work, however, seems to be long gone on Ohio Players.