Dan Auerbach - Keep It Hid (2009)

Dan Auerbach is one half of the Black Keys, a rock and roll duo striving to bring rock back to its barest roots in a twenty-first century setting.  For the most part, they've succeeded, with their heavy guitars, brooding lyrics, and sharp singing.  Keep It Hid, Auerbach's solo debut, was recorded while he and drummer Patrick Carney had a rift between them that they've since resolved.  Not surprisingly, Auerbach, as the Keys' guitarist and vocalist, came up with a record that sounds a lot like a demo for a Black Keys album, and the hallmarks of his blues and rock influences are all here.

Auerbach starts out surprisingly gently with the light ballad "Trouble Weighs a Ton," an acoustic number that could have come from a Ray LaMontagne album, but he pretty much heads for the ditch after that.  Most of the songs on Keep It Hid are musically raw and decadent.  Auerbach, who cites bluesmen like Robert Johnson as his influences, also shows an apparent love for the early Rolling Stones on this record, so he can't help but wax misogynistic.  "I Want Some More" finds Auerbach offering up biting guitar with a distorted vocal lustily contemplating a woman's physical attributes, while "Mean Monsoon" offers up ferocious music in a tale of someone finding out that his lady has been seeing someone else.

Auerbach plays the role of the wronged man in most of these songs, and much of the time his voice and arrangements glide along the edge of a razor, with all the danger that implies.  The women his male  characters encounter are liars and cheaters, some of whom cast spells he demonstrates the weight of with his music.  The title song perversely finds Auerbach's narrator trusting his woman to stay behind and wait for him to send from her while he escapes the law.  When all is said and done, though, Auerbach finds himself seeking forgiveness; Keep It Hid's best cut, "My Last Mistake," is a straightforward rocker in which he expresses regret for his foibles to a lover no longer wanting to have anything to do with him.  (He almost sounds like the late Levon Helm of the Band here, and as a singer Helm was the gold standard for his direct vocal style.) But on two lighter cuts, Auerbach seeks relief and almost seems to find it; "When The Night Comes" expresses contentment in laying his burden down to the backdrop of steady synthesizers, while the closing cut, "Goin' Home," moves along with a gentle acoustic guitar as Auerbach seeks to return home from a life of thrills and excitement.  But overall, Keep It Hid suggests that Auerbach hasn't yet made his last mistake . . . and his catharsis is a nasty but intriguing noise soaked in pure rock and roll.