The Black Keys represent one of our great regrets, in that we were latecomers to the party and missed the opportunity to cover the band’s development over the last few years, especially their amazing 2011 album, El Camino. However, with the news that they’re about to release their 8th studio album, Turn Blue, we get a chance to make up for the mistakes we made back in the day.
The problem though is that the news, bizarrely, comes via the medium of Mike Tyson’s Twitter page and The Black Keys’ official website contains zero reference to it as of yet, so we’re not 100% that it’s for real. However, it’d be a very strange series of events for this to be a weird hoax.
In the tweet, Tyson simply states, “Turn Blue”, before linking to the YouTube video below, which eventually goes on to show the closing text screen that says, “Special new album, Turn Blue, by rock musicians The Black Keys”. There’s then a bit of unreadable text that looks like it talks about it being available on vinyl, CD and digital download, before it’s announced that the album will see the light of of black and blues day on the 13th May 2014.
The video itself is just as random as the nature of the announcement as it features none of the members of The Black Keys, no new material and a complete lack of reference to the band itself except for the text in the final cut scene. What it’s mainly made up of is shots of a hypnotic spinning disk on a record player turn-table and freaky 70s style camera work featuring shots of the mental-faced narrator who rattles out phrases like, “I am inside you now” and “I will breath life into your hopelessness”. We’re not sure who the actor is, by the way, so if you know leave a comment below.
While the video is pretty random, we reckon it tells us a fair bit in subtext about Turn Blue, which is sort of alluded to in the opening monologue sentence of, “if you follow me you will turn blue”. Firstly, we know that The Black Keys are all about blues and blues rock, but with the hypnotic spinning disk and trance aspiring tones of the narrator we’d say that psychedelia will be the next phase of the bands musical development.
It’s also clear that there will be a fair bit of looking back in the new material with inspiration from the 60s and 70s and our expectation is that this will come through in the music on the album, the artwork and the music videos that come with it. While we’ll have to wait to see it all unfold, the band are clearly cranking up the anticipation levels with their mysterious approach to the release of their 8th studio album. On the other hand, Turn Blue hasn’t been added to either iTunes or Amazon yet for pre-order, so maybe it’ll turn out to be a dream after all.
