Over the past decade, Patrick Carney has cemented himself as the rhythmic core of the Black Keys. While Dan Auerbach ambled outward with woolly, blues-tinged guitar riffs, Carney’s muscular pummeling rooted the songs with leaden precision. In the band’s current spell of quiet, he’s teamed up with John Petkovic, an alumnus of Guided by Voices, Death of Samantha, Sweet Apple, and Cobra Verde, to form a new project called Sad Planets. The two bonded over their love for music and mutual hometown of Akron, Ohio; together, one might suppose, the two could fashion a record that capably paired their grittier bona fides with the polish of seasoned professionals. But the pair’s debut LP, Akron, Ohio, is a gummy, overwrought mess, an insult to both its namesake and, quite possibly, rock music as a whole.
It’s hard to understand how two musicians whose résumés bear some degree of cool-rock-dude credibility managed to make such a clunker; then again, the project reeks of runaway self-indulgence. The songs on Akron, Ohio are garish, graceless, and unsubtle; at the same time, the record has an uncanny-valley-like blandness, as if an exceptionally horny bot processed a thousand hours of stuff labeled “rock music” and spat out its own attempt. Neither of the men are strong vocalists, not even in the Oberst-esque category of “bad singer but it works.” Petkovic sounds pained as he sings—not emotionally, but as if he were in serious physical distress during the recording process. When he and Carney duet on “Not of This World” and “Yesterday Girls,” it feels like a musical version of two dudes cornering a guest on their amateur podcast.
Petkovic and Carney seem desperate to transmit the idea that Akron, Ohio is a Real Rock’n’Roll Record, Damn It, yet the result is an unrepentant caricature of the genre. Their electric-guitar flexes are flaccid; occasional synths get the gleeful treatment of a kid’s new toy. The masturbatory two-minute denouement of “Bad Cells” features lackluster guitar solos that seem to exist with the sole purpose of taking up space. “Want You to Want You” follows the blueprint of an upbeat adult-alternative hit, breaking up punchy verses full of nothingness with a breezy chorus stuffed with elongated vowels, and topping it off with a gear-shift key change at the end. Though most of the songs hover around the radio-friendly sweet spot of three and a half minutes, they all seem to last an eternity. (The lines that open the album’s first track—“I just landed here/But it feels like a year ago”—make for an unfortunate self-own.) Even featured guest J Mascis, Petkovic’s Sweet Apple bandmate, does little to save the opening snoozefest.