
Luckily, in 2007, they were tapped by producer Danger Mouse for a collaboration with Ike Turner, though when he passed away last December, the project left the duo with a host of material. This became the foundation of their fifth most adventurous album to date. Maneuvering between the King of Rhythm's joie de vivre their crestfallen, crossroads-blues heritage, Release subtly expands the Black Keys sound.
An auteur raised on hip-hop, DM keeps the record from staying overly loyal to the Creedence or Free templates. This is a small but crucial difference from 2006's "Magic Potion". He colors the band's no-frills narratives with futuristic accents or, on the opposite end, rural flourishes of psychedelia and folk. On each track they add a bolt of surprise that amplifies the pitch-black mood and message. Take the flutes and feedback of "Same Old Thing", which in combination suggest a childlike innocence peeled away by a cold, indifferent world. Likewise, a tension opens between the peppy xylophone and world-weary, Waitsian tremolo on "So He Won't Break".
Longtime Waits and Elvis Costello guitarist Marc Ribot lends his powers to this song and to the anguished 6/8 masterpiece "Lies". Here (and elsewhere: "Psychotic Girl", "I Got Mine", "Strange Times") Danger Mouse's layer of backing vocals imbue these earthly stories with a beyond-the-grave air, taking lost-love themes to an eerily literal but quintessentially blues-y level. The unexpected organ line of "All You Ever Wanted" feels like a police ambush on this jilted-John ballad. We almost forget that, in light of the band's uniformly lo-fi discography, nearly every fresh sound on "Attack & Release" should strike us as alien. A sequence of slow burns, the record's tempos allow you to relish the details and the textures. "Remember When (Side A)", with its eddies of reverb, envisions nostalgia as something dim and meticulously crafted, with a touch of the fantastic.

These men are stoics to the fingertips. "It doesn't mean a thing to me," Auerbach repeats on the chorus. The jaded ex of "Same Old Thing" speaks the same language: "It don't matter where you been." We know better. So it doesn't matter what other albums you've heard that play in this audio well, these two masters of their craft swim above it and drown in their assault.
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