Named for the witty rejoinder hurled at The Dude by the guy who pisses on his rug in the early moments of the Coen brothers' masterwork, The Big Lebowski, Everthus the Deadbeats has been compared favorably to everyone from Ween to The Stranglers to Oingo Boingo to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Named for the witty rejoinder hurled at The Dude by the guy who pisses on his rug in the early moments of the Coen brothers' masterwork, The Big Lebowski, Everthus the Deadbeats has been compared favorably to everyone from Ween to TheAnd while all of that seems at the very least appropriate and occasionally dead on the mark, it hardly begins to accurately describe the sonic jaw drop that accompanies your first exposure to the mad, mad, mad, mad world of Everthus the Deadbeats.

Take the phonically playful "Trevor Dust the Bedsheets," from the Muncie, Ind., quintet's most recent EP, Addicts Stuck in Traffic. Vocalist John Muyelle works the dark side of the microphone, a cross between Bunnyman Ian McCullough and Lust For Life-era Iggy Pop, while the band swings into psychotic Pop carnival mode, like Sparks collaborating with Danny Elfman on the soundtrack to a Tim Burton animated epic about disquieting childhood fears coming to fabulously shrieking real life. Propelled by the twin keyboards of Muyelle and Lisa Berlin, guitarist Allen Bannister's velvety psychotronic six-string crunch, Benny Sanders' fuzz-drenched bass and Dan Fahrner's subtle yet insistent timekeeping, Everthus the Deadbeats veer crazily from manic Pop to frenetic Dance/Jazz to blistering AltRock with barely a flinch.

ETD are Rock freaks with an ominously twisted sense of humor and self and an expansive view of music history and their well deserved place in the sonic food chain. (BB)
06.20.07