The Black Keys have brought their North American arena tour to New York City for a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden tonight, with special guests Arctic Monkeys. This will be the band's first-ever headlining show there. Check out the commemorative poster for the show by Shepard Fairey (at left), with a photo of the duo by Danny Clinch, available, while they last, at the merch area at tonight's show. The bands return for a second show at the Garden next week following tour stops in Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Indianapolis, Grand Rapids, and Cleveland, outside The Black Keys' home town of Akron, Ohio, where they were recently added to the Wall of Fame of their alma mater, Firestone High School. It all follows this past weekend's stellar shows in Washington, DC, on Friday and in Philadelphia on Saturday.

"The fabulous success of the Black Keys makes for one of the more intriguing stories in current pop music," writes reviewer Dave McKenna in the Washington Post. "Over the past decade, the duo from Akron, Ohio ... has gone from playing small clubs and making small records for a small Mississippi blues label to filling the largest rooms on the rock-and-roll circuit. And they’ve made the big leaps without making any obvious artistic concessions. Friday night the band thrilled the crowd that packed Verizon Center with nearly two hours of a brand of guitar rock whose demise, judging from this show, has been greatly exaggerated." Read the complete concert review at washingtonpost.com.

The Philadelphia Inquirer found much the same to be true the following night. "They are a big band in these small times, and Saturday night they delivered a smoking-gun performance—which is to say they killed—at the sold-out Wells Fargo Center," exclaims the Inquirer's Jonathan Valania.

When it was just band mates Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney on stage, "a casual observer could look around and marvel at the fact that, with nothing more than the bang and strum of a drum and a guitar, The Black Keys could lure in 14,864 souls Pied Piperlike into this vast arena and hold their rapturous attention for nearly two hours," Valania reports. "And then you would stop and think how often that happens—which is pretty much never—and think how lucky you are to be here now."

Read the review at philly.com.

For additional details on upcoming tour dates, go to nonesuch.com/on-tour. To pick up a copy of their new album, El Camino, head to the Nonesuch Store, where CD and vinyl orders include MP3s of the album at checkout.