The Black Keys Perform Live on the Interface

They may have gone back to the basics, but the Black Keys' new album 'Brothers' certainly taps into a T. Rex vibe at times, a bit of a new direction for the Ohio-bred blues duo. "I think that [Marc Bolan] was kind of copying the same stuff that we were," Keys guitarist/vocalist Dan Auerbach admitted to Spinner at a recent Interface taping in New York. But let's be clear: no one's going to be accusing them of "going glam" anytime soon.

"We couldn't pull it off," said drummer Patrick Carney. "We were too old. Kind of like, not thin enough, not androgynous enough."

Indeed, the Black Keys are a muscular band -- there's nothing emo or wimpy about them. It's what Carney calls "garbage."

"When we first started out, we could only make things sound like garbage," Carney said. "But we liked the way garbage sounded, and so we had no problem. Then we started encountering problems when we wanted things to sound like really nice garbage. It's hard to get things to sound big and trashy."

Along with rocking some hard-edged glam-blues, the Black Keys recently were the force behind Blackroc, a collaboration between the duo and some of hip-hop's brightest stars: Jim Jones, RZA, Raekwon and Mos Def, to name a few. As one might expect, working in this rhythmic heavy environment seeped into the 'Brothers' sessions.

"We started every song with bass and drums rather than guitar and drums," Carney explained. "We found that when we approached making music that way, we had a greater ability to zone in on the groove and then think about melody afterwards, so it's kind of a better skeleton. That's how we made 'Brothers,' doing the same thing for the most part."