Black Keys and Arctic Monkeys at Madison Square Garden Patrick Carney, left, and Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys performing in support of their album "El Camino" at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. Primordial equals durable for the Black Keys, a two-man band - Patrick Carney on drums, and Dan Auerbach on guitar and vocals - originally from Akron, Ohio, and recently transplanted to Nashville. Visuals aside, their concert on Monday night could easily have taken place in 1973. It was a set full of stomping drumbeats and distorted guitar riffs carrying mostly declarations of woman trouble and other mental distress. The songs were blues-rock, garage-rock, borderline psychedelia and loud pop, mostly harking back to the 1960s; the most recent musical reference, with brawny guitar tones and upper-register backing vocals, was the T. Rex of "Bang a Gong (Get It On) " and "Jeepster." Yet the Black Keys weren't playing some blues bar for a handful of nostalgic baby boomers or a classic-rock radio station's office party. This was a sold-out Madison Square Garden, with a general-admission floor crowd clamoring toward the stage and an audience full of girls eager to dance and scream. The band, formed in 2001, has had a decade-long ascent; it released its seventh album, "El Camino," last year. While early releases included songs by the band's obvious models - raw bluesmen like R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough - the Black Keys haven't played up their revivalism and haven't worried about authenticity. They just play the rock they like, drawing on country, surf-rock, glam-rock and soul. Occasionally a song expands beyond verse and chorus to multiple, contrasting sections, like "Strange Times," which knocks together near-metal and the Beatles. One difference between the Black Keys and previous generations of blues-rockers is an emphasis on songs, not guitar solos, although Mr. Auerbach can unleash a brazen, buttonholing lead line when he chooses to. The Black Keys keep their music lean and blunt; it easily scales up to arena size. After making lo-fi albums on their own, they started working with the producer Danger Mouse, who was their collaborator on "El Camino," on the 2008 album "Attack & Release," and on the song "Tighten Up," which starts with a whistled hook and gave the Black Keys a radio hit. Now, after endless touring as a bare-bones duo, the band has added two sidemen: Gus Seyffert on bass, and John Wood on keyboards. But the Black Keys reverted to a duo for the middle segment of the show, reaching back to older songs like "Thickfreakness" and "Girl Is on My Mind." Mr. Auerbach's thumb reclaimed the bass lines, and feedback and Mr. Carney's cymbals filled the frequencies where keyboards had been. They weren't pretending to be anywhere but an arena. A giant video backdrop showed splashy animated graphics and black-and-white road trip footage. Banks of spotlights flashed behind the band, and not one but two disco balls were lowered for an encore, "Everlasting Light." But what really kept the concert in motion were the fundamentals that a blues-rock band picks up the old-fashioned way, playing night after night: the dynamics of musicians creating tension and release, easing back before building a long crescendo on the way to another crashing peak, grounding themselves in the power of beat, riff and moan. The rudiments still work. Arctic Monkeys, the English band that opened the concert with an hourlong set, juggle more elaborate musical ingredients. A punk-speed rhythm section and frenetic yet precise guitars gallop and gnash. Alex Turner, the band's leader, sustains melodies within the clamor, singing hard-nosed observations - sometimes cryptic, sometimes bitterly cynical - in a baleful baritone croon. They were running, skillfully, on caffeine and adrenaline; the Black Keys, when they took over, burned diesel. The Blacks Keys return to Madison Square Garden on March 22; garden-ny.com.