The Black Keys: Rubber Factory [FAT POSSUM]

Why you'll love it

This Fat Possum pressing is on 180g vinyl with a download card. Rubber Factory was the duo's first album on the Billboard 200, it scored 81 on Metacritic, and Entertainment Weekly gave it an A.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Download card included

About the album

When the landlord sold the basement where Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach had made their first two albums, the pair rented the second floor of a shuttered General Tire factory in East Akron for $500 a month. They called it Sentient Sound, ran cables across the hallways and got to work on recycled tape sent up from Fat Possum's studios in Mississippi.

Carney recorded, the band produced and mixed, and Greg Calbi mastered, with Auerbach adding fiddle and lap steel to his guitar. "When The Lights Go Out" turned up in Black Snake Moan, "Grown So Ugly" plays during the party in Cloverfield, "Stack Shot Billy" got an airing on Late Show with David Letterman, and "Keep Me" and "The Desperate Man" show off the duo's slow burn. Carney's brother Michael built the cover collage from tire piles, the Goodyear Blimp and East Akron storefronts.

The factory came down in 2010. One more local detail: the mixing console came off eBay from a former sound tech for Loverboy, so Canada can claim a small, slightly temperamental share of the credit.

Also at Kops: more The Black Keys on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Fat Possum (cat# 80379-1), a reissue of the 2004 album.