Ohio Players

Beck appears on half the tracks –his deadpan gospel is especially discernible on “Beautiful People (Stay High)” – Noel Gallagher on three songs, and an invigorating hip-hop influence is contributed by Juicy J, Lil Noid and Dan The Automator. The sum of these disparate parts is an album with that infectious quality of sounding like it was a total blast to make. [Apr 2024, p.29]

The duo of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney have found that creative musical joy again, with the overarching feeling on the album being, fun.

Their rock’n’roll friends, from Beck to Noel Gallagher, are on hand to lend the album a rabble-rousing tone. Ohio Players sounds like a house party where the whiskey is flowing.

Overall, it's the sound of a band rejuvenated. [May 2024, p.84]

This is arguably the sharpest collection of songs the Keys have come up with.

The Black Keys who, after 23 years together, know themselves well enough to know how to accentuate their strengths by choosing the right musician for the right song, confident that they’ll wind up with a record that sounds unmistakably like themselves.

The Black Keys, get in, rock you, and get out. If song quality seems to falter toward the end, it is only by the slightest of degrees, making Ohio Players one of those records that can be enjoyed in one satisfying sitting.

Ohio Players isn't the most frantic celebration the Black Keys have delivered, but more than enough of it will get your body moving that it qualifies as a success.

As with all their output, ‘Ohio Players’ is a few tracks longer than necessary (the cover of William Bell’s ‘I Forgot To Be Your Lover’ is superfluous) but otherwise finds the duo in spirited form.

Because ‘You’ll Pay’, ‘Read Em And Weep’, ‘Only Love’, ‘Fever Tree’ (a charming cover of William Bell’s ‘I Forgot To Be Your Lover’), and ‘Don’t Let Me Go’ are all peppered with a shimmering strut, and the kind of euphoria that’s surely only a well-filmed choreo sequence away from the kind of virality enjoyed by Jungle of late. And this is a lane that fits The Black Keys like a glove.

The duo also make room for classy experimentation, adroitly merging jangly blues with languid hip-hop on Paper Crown. The gaps are filled with a series of sunny Beatlesque numbers that feel lightweight and often rather inane. It’s an all-bases approach that doesn’t feel so much like an identity crisis as a slightly underwhelming diffusion of the band’s once heady magic.

This is a pretty good Black Keys record that chiefly serves to underline how wedded they are to the fundamentals of their own process.

What’s frustrating is that Ohio Players boasts some great hooks beneath the mire.