10 Greatest Garage Rock Albums Of The 2000s

In the first decade of their career, The Black Keys were often accused of stealing their style from the biggest name in bluesy garage -- The White Stripes -- but this is to entirely miss the profound contribution they made to the genre.

The truest garage rock is, of course, supposed to sound as if it could have been recorded in a garage. But few people in the 2000s took that so literally as the Keys. For the Ohian duo, garage rock is more than merely a musical aesthetic, it's a way of life. Innovative from the outset, they wrote and recorded their music as close to the natural sound as they could get, using basic equipment, single takes and only the instruments they had to hand.

Few places is this better exemplified than on their third album, 2004's Rubber Factory, which was literally recorded in an old tire factory. Tracked on recycled tape and in an environment which singer Patrick Carney said was wholly unsuited to music production -- with maximum discomfort, dingy acoustics and faulty equipment -- the duo nonetheless produced a full album of raw analogue tracks lashed to the garage mast with old-timey vocals, and bursting with gorgeous licks and hooks. So successful were tracks like "10A.M. Automatic" and "When the Lights Go Out" that they got picked up for films and adverts, boosting the band to international fame.

A hundred bands could spend a thousand times the money and never produce anything half as good.