w/Me Infecto, the Abodox, Dypak

Tues Feb 18, the Crocodile, $6, 18+.

It starts innocently. An autumnal guitar melody drifts in like a waft of smoke, lingering as half-buried vocals and scattered drumbeats build. Then, like the footfalls of a mighty giant, the bass, the distortion, and the screaming vocals slowly stomp through anything that could be described as resting delicately; drumbeats grow more schizophrenic, guitar parts become jagged as barbed wire, and the sound morphs between cacophonous noise and slow hammers of heavy repetition. "Quarterhorse is minimalist loud rock," says drummer Matt Lebens on the phone from Olympia, where bassist Evan Yamakawa also lives. (Singer/guitarist Aaron Stevens lives in Portland.) "We take our sweet time with our progressions, and build up to the point where people's eardrums rattle. Some people say it's repetitive as all hell, but that's part of the beauty of it."

Informed by the subdued-to-explosive dynamics of bands like Shellac and Drive Like Jehu, the Quarterhorse tear your head off in calculated swipes. The repetitions Lebens refers to are the deepening of one sound through the song until its oppressiveness gets a breather in a short mood swing. "A lot of the bands I really like tend to drop down and have the bass play one single line through the whole song," says Lebens. "The guitar touches in every once in a while, and the drums switch up their beats, but in a nutshell it's the same thing all the way through, although there's all sorts of different elements."

On the Quarterhorse's debut, 2002's I Was on Fire for You, the songs build around the bass, a bottom-heavy aesthetic that producer Steve Albini helped bring even further to the forefront. "[Albini] basically added a brick layer to our sound, dropping the foundation and having it all be based on the low end," says Lebens. "It's getting louder and it's getting more energetic," he adds. Whatever's happening, the Quarterhorse are on a path to greatness, as long as they keep rattling eardrums along the way.