The Black Keys have been pumping out well-received music for almost ten years now. Critics love it; audiences love it; and to even skim the Wikipedia entry about them made me wonder, a little, how film and TV-show soundtrack producers would have done without them in that decade.

But — true to form — I’ve always seemed to be looking in the wrong direction. When their 2010 album, Brothers, won a Grammy as best alt-rock album of the year… um, yeah… well… [whistling to fill embarrassed silence]

Their most recent, El Camino, just came out yesterday; it already seems headed for the same level of acclaim as Brothers. Metacritic puts it at a composite 84 “Metascore,” vs. 82 for the previous album. Yet reading those reviews, even just their capsule summaries, raises a weird question: have they all listened to all of the band’s music? (Some of the criticism implies that El Camino burns the bridges carefully built by earlier releases; some insists that it’s rehashing history. Go figure.)

Obviously, I’m in no position myself to judge El Camino next to The Black Keys’ other stuff. But I’ve at least listened to this one, and now I’m really embarrassed to have overlooked the band for so long. I couldn’t decide which of several tunes to include in today’s post… and then I saw the video for “Lonely Boy,” the first track: an instant classic in the get-up-and-dance genre.

[Lyrics]

Damn. They never show that guy’s feet, but he may have been told to keep them inside a two-foot-square box — and then followed the instructions.