The year 2002, when the Black Keys released their debut The Big Come Up, seems like such an innocent time in hindsight. This album was a cult fixation. Who could’ve predicted the car commercials, the prolific licensing of this band, the festival headlining gigs, or the total impossibility of avoiding El Camino singles like, if you went outside? But there’s also a kind of innocence to how this stuff was so invigorating, a grungy blues duo as a tangent to the early ’00s retro rock revival business. The first four Black Keys albums were released in such a blur that they kind of, you know, blur together as entities. Revisiting The Big Come Up all these years later reveals a record that’s actually quite a bit straight-bluesier than the big, chunky blues-rock riffage that’d populate its successors. Personally, I’d take The Big Come Up over some of the albums that immediately followed: I find it spritelier, less prone to the ponderousness the band could fall into during some of their heavier moments. This version of the band is now pretty much totally unrecognizable, and ironically enough there’s something invigorating about The Big Come Up again in 2015, hearing the earliest and in many ways loosest Black Keys ethos once more. The thing is, that inability to now recognize this as the Black Keys puts The Big Come Up in a weird place when taking in the whole of their discography. It might be one of the better albums they’ve made, but it doesn’t quite feel like the band we knew even by the next year on Thickfreakness, let alone now. It was an important first step and a more enduring listen than some of their other material, but also feels destined to live on as a gem of an outlier in the history of a band that would eventually choose a much different identity.