E-Mail This Article to a Friend The best of the fest The Black Keys and half a dozen other picks for this weekend’s NEMO festival BY TED DROZDOWSKI

The Black Keys say they recorded their 2003 underground hit Thickfreakness (Fat Possum) in their basement. But the truth is, they just opened up a big can of whup-ass and smeared it all over their songs. You can hear the grease in Dan Auerbach’s fat furry guitars and even the sound of the empty can rattling through Patrick Carney’s drums.

Sure, the White Stripes had conditioned listeners to the notion of a modern two-piece band’s sounding like more. But the Black Keys, who play the Paradise as part of the NEMO Music Festival this Friday, sound like more than the White Stripes: bigger and fuzzier, with hotter licks, and a heart that beats closer to what echoes out of the deep Southern juke joints where the æsthetic that inspired both outfits was born.

The Black Keys are among the 250 bands who’ll blast through local clubs this weekend as part of the annual shindig thrown by NEMO (www.nemoboston.com), the organization that stages the Boston Music Awards and a music-biz conference in addition to the festival. And the Keys are one of the very best. Although they have their boots in the blues, the gritty Thickfreakness blasts with the ass-stomping power of rock. The open the new album with a cover of Richard Berry’s "Have Love Will Travel," a song made famous by the Sonics, and nail that down flat.

Nonetheless, their first album, 2002’s The Big Come Up (Alive), is more a blues record with an attitude problem. The guitars still need a shave, and the drums roll like empty barrels falling off the back of a truck, but Auerbach and Carney tackle their late labelmate Junior Kimbrough’s "Do the Rump" and get a brain feed from the slash-and-drone legacy of Mississippi Fred McDowell. They also play the Beatles’ "She Said, She Said" as if the tune had somehow made its way into the hands of the world’s most dangerous roadhouse band — which the Black Keys may be.

When I catch Auerbach on his cell phone driving somewhere between gigs in San Francisco and Los Angeles, he explains that the new Black Keys album, Rubber Factory (Fat Possum), was recorded by him and Carney in the bowels of an old industrial building in their home town of Akron. Maybe that’s true. It does have less whup-ass than Thickfreakness and a lot more allusions to the old-time dirty blues and unvarnished ballads Auerbach heard in his dad’s record collection. But just because numbers like "Just Couldn’t Tie Me Down" and "The Lengths" feature Delta-bred rhythms and down-home slide guitar translated from LPs doesn’t make the Black Keys a born-again blues band. On Rubber Factory, they remain fusionists, as dedicated to traditional boogie as their rock predecessors Canned Heat and Humble Pie; yet they’re also determined, sly sonic strategists who know their low-tuned, low-toned guitar and bathtub drums work psycho-acoustic magic. Live, especially, their blend of bottom-heavy sonorities and over-the-top energy can crawl right inside listeners and lay eggs. Which is why the Black Keys have staying power.

"We’ve just always had that sound," Auerbach explains. "My guitar tone is definitely dark, and Pat keeps his kit kind of low and loose, and the sound’s so big and full, we don’t need anybody else.

The odds were stacked against the Black Keys when they ignited. "There was no scene in Akron," Auerbach says. "There wasn’t even a club when we started 10 years ago, but maybe that’s what was so great about it. If you wanted to do anything, you were on your own."

So they were forced to get in a van and travel to play shows. As luck had it, they caught Fat Possum’s interest on their first West Coast tour, after The Big Come Up. "We liked the idea they’d let us do what we want," says Auerbach. "If you listen to Junior Kimbrough or T-Model Ford, you know Fat Possum likes raw music, so we knew we wouldn’t have to make something slick and stupid."

Indeed, what the Black Keys do is sticky and smart, rooted and raucously revolutionary. The important difference between Rubber Factory and Thickfreakness isn’t really less whup-ass but rather more dynamics and textured sounds. That’s largely due to Auerbach’s deployment of sweet ’n’ stingy lap steel, fiddle, and more-nuanced playing — until he pops open the whup-ass can again and makes his guitar sing like a dyspeptic demon on "Grown So Ugly."

Whether or not you love the Black Keys, who deserve some of your sugar, their sound sticks in your ears. And not just because of their skull-hammering volume on stage. For Al Kooper, the rock-and-roll legend who made a rare local foray from his Somerville home to play Hammond B-3 organ with the Black Keys when they appeared at the Paradise last year, the aural glue is Auerbach’s distinctive guitar and voice. "Dan can handily replicate the sound of an old black blues player," says Kooper. "I was impressed with that right off the bat. I love the way he synthesizes black bluesmen while Patrick plays a bar-room stumblebum kind of thing. It really sounds like old people. It’s very refreshing. I don’t think that’s what the White Stripes are doing. The Black Keys stand out in modern American music. They’re number one in a field of one."