Thickfreakness

Few rock recordings from the 2000s feel as genuinely primitive as "Thickfreakness," and that primitiveness is the entire point. Recorded in a single overnight session on analog tape with almost no overdubs, the song is essentially two people generating as much sonic mass as two people possibly can — a guitar riff that sounds dredged from the delta, distorted to the point of near-abstraction, and drums that hit with the blunt force of someone who has no interest in finesse. The bass frequencies are enormous, almost uncomfortably so, filling the room in a way that makes the track feel three-dimensional when played loud. Auerbach's vocals here are primal, closer to a howl than a croon, abandoning the more controlled blues affectations of later records for something rawer and more urgent. There's a hypnotic quality to the repetition — the song doesn't really go anywhere in the conventional sense, it just deepens, the groove becoming more inescapable with each cycle. This is the Black Keys before any commercial considerations entered the picture, a document of two guys from Akron who loved Charley Patton and Junior Kimbrough and wanted to see how far down into that well they could reach. It belongs on a speaker turned up past the point of comfort, in a room where nobody is trying to have a conversation.