The Black Keys — singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney on drums — are a two-man combo with a big-band mind. On Brothers, their first studio album after a year of offshoot affairs (Auerbach's solo album, Keep It Hid; Carney's side group, Drummer; a hip-hop project, BlakRoc), the Keys make a thick, dirty racket, overdubbed but never overstuffed. "Everlasting Light" has hive-of-bees distortion, corn-pone harmonies and an Auerbach falsetto that suggests Prince singing through a mummy's gauze. In "Ten Cent Pistol," the pair pile on the menace — a garage quintet's worth of guitars, organ and heavy death march — while leaving enough cold air in a mix that feels like a graveyard recital. Auerbach and Carney did as much on 2008's Attack & Release, produced by Danger Mouse. But Brothers, recorded largely in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with little outside help, has a higher ratio of compelling songs and distress. "The Only One" is slow, earthy sorrow, too roughly handled for pop radio here but a surefire hit on some distant blues planet. And I would have ended the album (which runs a little too long) with "I'm Not the One." With its rusted electric piano, aching bridge and Auerbach's ravaged vocal, it is a deep-fried wrong-love song destined for a payday cover in the straight world.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."