The Black Keys rocks the Marquee

 by Tye Rabens
 published on Monday, March 31, 2008

While hordes of Valley residents were enjoying themselves at the Tempe Music Festival at Tempe Beach Park on Friday, others were across the bridge getting their guts rocked out by The Black Keys.

The duo displayed their stripped-bare fervor at the Marquee Theatre, and the sardine-packed crowd was rewarded for choosing this raw entertainment over the Tempe Music Festival.

The Black Keys are Dan Auerback (guitar and vocals) and Patrick Carney (drums). They are childhood friends from Akron, Ohio, who supposedly quit their jobs mowing lawns for a slumlord to play music. The result is an entrepreneurial, yet old-fashioned, fusion of several styles: blues, folk, garage, punk, bluegrass, but mostly rock 'n' roll. Despite their obvious influences, they cannot be compared to a specific genre or other artist. The Black Keys take all the music they like listening to, improve upon it with the compassion of a deer doting over her fawn, and then slam it together with the violence of a cock fight.

This raw intensity has all the more resonance in live performance. Auerback's vocals are a southern growl, the ideal complement to his rumbling, yet shrieking, guitar riffs. Carney backs up this distorted thunderstorm with pounding rock drum beats that hold song tempos together with an archaic perfection.

Plus, they play loud. Really loud. And it makes you jump and move. Marquee Theatre was packed with jostling fans — some shirtless and screaming, some enthusiastically jostling for a position to see the intensity of the performers on stage.

Tickets were a bit pricey, around $20. The opening act, punk soloist Joe Reatard, did not perform because of sickness, and the replacement was a 50-year-old local funk-and-soul vinyl guru. And that's exactly what he played, for at least an hour.

But none of this mattered once The Black Keys took stage. The pair tore through more than a dozen tunes, both from their spankin'-new LP "Attack and Release" and from old fan favorites, like Rubber Factory's "Girl Is On My Mind." Auerback and Carney walked off around 10:45 p.m., but eventually yielded to the crowd's 5-minute encore appeal with three more songs.

Reach the reporter at: trabens@asu.edu.