Pitchfork

The pressure to make a White Stripes comparison here is almost unbearable, so I'll get this out of the way quick-like: The Black Keys and the Stripes will inevitably be indexed on the same page in the great canon of Rock history, but paper similarities aside-- each duo brazenly, turbulently rehashing American blues tradition through a minimalist storm of scraping guitars and bruised skins-- they've got almost nothing in common. The Black Keys may just be a couple of white dudes from Akron, but they seem closer in spirit to something that Muddy Waters himself might've considered "the blues" than to any midwestern bar-band's approximation of it. The only Stripes link of any importance, in fact, is that the Keys' previous album was better, too.

Last year's The Big Come-Up introduced the garage-grime and "white Hendrix" croon of The Sonics to the unholy strut of Junior Kimbrough's legendary guitar lines, fusing them into a spitting, spewing, 40-ton monster. Winners like "Heavy Soul" evoked the primal ballet of Fordzilla crushing unmanned Buicks, and when it wasn't busy flattening rides, still offered a glimpse of the delicate machinery under the hood with soul cuts like "I'll Be Your Man". With Thickfreakness, the once-massive guitar is exponentially weightier, thicker, and juicier, swelling to Earth-shaking proportions, at the unfortunate loss of a little subtlety. But that's just the way it is sometimes; there's no room for luxuries like nuanced variations in tone, or shifting rhythms when you're fleeing from a fire-breathing behemoth.

Still, swallow enough white-hot blues riffs and you get heartburn; it's hard not to miss Come-Up's pace-breaking exercises like "Countdown" or "Them Eyes" after blues explosion #348 (and counting). Even at its most delicate, Dan Auerbach's fretwork still hits like a hollowbody that's been filled with cement, and Patrick Carney's swaying grooves seem suppressed, driven further back in the mix. Once again, the Keys stomp as violently and elementally as before, but they nearly get carried away. Tracks like "If You See Me" and "Hurt Like Mine" attempt to reduce Thickfreakness' wildfire to merely a controlled burn, but even when the Keys try to play it cool on this album, they still run hot. Nothing strays too far from the molten desperation of a more typical offering of "Midnight" or an uber-faithful cover of The Sonics' "Have Love Will Travel".

Ah, but who'm I kidding? Thickfreakness may veer towards oppressively monolithic, but it's also equal parts sincerity and devotion, thunder and lightning, majesty and naked anger. Look upon the power of the title track, mortals, and despair! The central riff splits heaven and earth, and for a few brief minutes, commands all your attention as you fear for your very life; it's an exorcism, a catharsis. And it only gets thicker and freakier from there, lurching into the cautionary force of the too-similar "Hard Row"; like a simplified, but equally relentless version of its predecessor, the simple bluster is momentarily awe-inspiring. When Auerbach howls, "It's a hard row to hoe by yourself," the release is overwhelming.

But sure enough, the intensity of the opening combination proves impossible to maintain for long. Though the stutter-stepping percussion and racing, rise/fall soloing of "Set You Free" nearly succeeds at preserving the pummeling drive beyond all limits of human endurance, it ends up being the most purely entertaining cut on the album simply out of the necessity for respite. The body braces itself for another towering blast after being further skewered by Auerbach's nasty hooks in the opening seconds, and gets (only a little) less than that, but the relaxation is welcome. From that point on, Thickfreakness begins to run together slightly, though as mentioned earlier, not for lack of energy.

The related concerns of a need for a bit more understatement and variety hinder the Black Keys this time around, but remain somewhat insignificant in relation to their even-more-muscular blues attack. On top of that, the ultra-minimal echoes of "Cry Alone" and the R.L. Burnside-as-channeled-thru-MC5 tangle of "Hold Me in Your Arms" partially ameliorates the somewhat pervasive sameness, closing the album with a distinctly different sound than they've yet shown. All told, the shortcomings are relative to what the duo already proved themselves capable of on The Big Come-Up; Thickfreakness isn't quite their debut, but it's still a powerhouse, even exceeding its ancestor in total spectacle. Raw rock grandeur as so frequently conjured up on this album is hard to come by in any capacity; if that means having to overlook a few minor flaws, it's worth it.