Commercial rock 'n' roll is sounding too safe these days. Turn on the radio and it's all kinda friendly, kinda fun, energetic blah-blah bland. The Catheters, however, are the antithesis of nice rock. They sound dangerous. They sound sleazy. They sound fucked-up in the best possible way. Their music makes your heart race and your adrenaline rush--like hearing a scream outside your window at three a.m., or racing through alleyways at 200 mph. They make really noisy punk that's got this heavy, fast, raw, breakneck kinda sound that just doesn't give a shit. And their lyrics drip with sarcasm--whether the topic is New York burning, or magnifying the coarse grains of ugliness on someone's face.

They're an amazing fucking band--my new favorite band since I heard their recent Sub Pop record, Static Delusions and Stone-Still Days, and my even more new favorite band when I got to hang out with them in Austin, at South by Southwest (the annual music-industry festival). And even more my new favorite band when I witnessed their live show, which explodes like a grenade and leaves your brains splattered on the ceiling. They played the opening slot on the last night of the big Texas music marathon at a hole-in-the-wall club called Room 710, and I could've missed all the other bands in the festival (well, except for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, 'cause they rocked too) and I still would've gotten my money's worth from the Catheters. After a full weekend of international acts and different genres, I can tell you that these Seattle boys have the best band, hands down.

The breakdown on the Catheters: First of all, they're young. They were born in the '80s. Only one of them, Derek Mason (the guitar player), is old enough to legally buy booze. The other guys spent the weekend wiping the underage X's off their hands as they downed beers. And they grew up listening to good stuff, like Nirvana, Mudhoney, and the Melvins, and some other music I'm not allowed to tell you about because they think it's embarrassing and they get a lot of shit from music snobs. But most importantly, they like the Stooges. Brian Standeford, the less damaged/more shy/slightly freckled Iggy Pop of the Catheters, picked up some Stooges vinyl in Austin. "I listen to albums like Funhouse, and a lot of albums that have a really spur-of-the-moment, live sound with a lot of noise and lo-fi recording," he told me when we talked before the band's Austin gig, "and we sort of wanted to do that the best we could."

Sub Pop's press release claims Static Delusions was recorded in 36 hours. The truth is, it took a lot longer than that--but the manic energy shooting out of the speakers makes the band's second release sound like it was recorded during a raging bender, while the members' worlds were rotting around then. After listening to the album, I expected to meet some crazy motherfuckers who like to break shit. Instead I got four laid-back guys who've studied up on their Northwest sonic history. "We're really mild-mannered," explains Leo Gebhart, the bassist for the band (and the dude with the badass "troublemaker" tattoo on his stomach). Gebhart didn't spend the studio days bulleting through a nervous breakdown; he was busy fasting (or trying to fast, for four days). "I made it all the way through the first day of not eating and the next day, I was like, 'Fuck this.' Recording that album took a lot of energy," he says, laughing. When Sub Pop brought pizzas to the recording studio, it was all over.

So there's no insanity running through this band--at least not yet. We made plans to trash a hotel room, rock 'n' roll-style, and Davey Brozowski, the drummer, was gonna teach me about making the damage almost invisible. But that never happened. The wildest thing that happened was that we all did shots and got drunk, and I got to meet Gebhart's sister, her husband, and her very nice, proper British in-laws. And we drove around in the Catheters' tour van while the guys ran errands at guitar stores. No televisions went through windows, no fists went through walls. Standeford almost killed himself during the Catheters' show, though, by diving into an audience that forgot to catch him--after which he gave the crowd a little lecture on show etiquette.

Somehow, these four mild-mannered dudes managed to project a nasty punk storm without being nasty guys themselves, which makes them all that much cooler. After so much gentle rock 'n' roll clogging up the airwaves, the Catheters are wreaking some primal fucking havoc. Even if they couldn't wreck our hotel rooms.