Keep It Hid

Relative to the garage-rock outfits with whom they were compared to in the first part of this decade, the Black Keys have more or less stuck with their thing: austerely nostalgic, drums-and-guitar-in-a-dying-industrial-city blues-rock. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney have managed to forge a career and five albums out of variations-on-a-theme riffs and stripped-for-parts grooves, outliving almost all of those peers. They lack the audacity of Jack White (in fact, their blues-rock extends more from Midwestern modesty than from self-aware showboating), and the Reigning Sound's Greg Cartwright has a stronger melodic sensibility and more potent lyrical venom. Their limited range, however, stands in inverse proportion to their sturdy longevity, which always seemed built into their conceptual underpinning, as if the sheer quantity of songs legitimizes their Spartan approach.