Open a major music mag this year, and it was hard not to see a pic of the scruffy guitar-and-drums duo from Akron staring back at you. (Entertainment Weekly even named them one of its "10 Bands on the Brink.") Best of all, Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach's album Thickfreakness actually deserves the heaps of ink expended on it. Inspired by rural blues, with postmodern winks going on beneath the surface, the band's music makes a fine go-with to Beck, who picked the Keys to open his summer tour.