The Cripples
w/the Epoxies, the Fitness
Thurs May 30 at I-Spy, $8.

The poppy '80s flashbacks striking the musical underground come with a complex, darker lining of cynical noise-addicts who often go overlooked by the mainstream. Rip apart the shiny, MTV kitsch package and there's a swarm of older influential acts who confronted audiences with art-damaged noise and dismal, slap-you-to-attention sounds.

The Cripples are a local act influenced by the "dark lining" from over two decades of boundary-breaking acts. The band speaks passionately about '80s stalwarts like Devo, but is careful to explain they like the early, Hardcore-era material from the '70s. When it comes to the Reagan years, the Cripples have a more complicated list of greatest hits that includes bands like the Germs, the Screamers, and the Nip Drivers over the usual suspects played at retro theme nights. Explains keyboardist/singer Ross Marshall, "We did an '80s night at the Crocodile and the bands all did New Order and OMD covers. We were like, Minor Threat was from the '80s, so let's do a Minor Threat song."

Adds co-keyboardist/singer/guitarist Greg Heino, "That's where we get touchy about the new new wave thing. We thought it would be fun to play that ['80s night] 'cause we did Pussy Galore and Minor Threat--stuff we thought was cool."

Older bands that could care less about making accessible music have seeped their way into the essence of the Cripples, as the eight-year-old, dual-keyboard act pile-drives everything from upbeat pop to punk to jolts of white noise. Their musical movements shape- shift into dense splatterings of beats and jittery swatches of experimental fits. On the band's upcoming debut for Dirtnap Records, Dirty Head (out June 10), the Cripples launch with a hook-driven track about contraception and delve deeper into aggressive synth noise, replacing punk's usual guitar-centric propulsions with a myriad of keyboard sounds before floating back to the surface with a final pop coda about the secret police. "The basic idea was for the synthesizers to sound like Greg Ginn's [Black Flag] guitar, tonally," explains Heino of Dirty's overall sound. "The reason I like keyboards is that you can make noises with them that you can't make with a guitar, and I feel like I've heard every guitar noise that everyone's tried to make, ever. And I haven't heard every keyboard noise that everyone's tried to make, ever, so I'd much rather play keyboards."

Adds Marshall, "Very few people are [using keyboards] as an integral part of writing the song, as part of the riff as opposed to part of the decoration or an organ that sounds like Duran Duran or something."

The Cripples don't completely shun the rock structure, though. Marshall expresses a love for the saturated noise of the Stooges' Raw Power, and the band's lineup includes both bassist Erik Stockinger and drummer Reba Cowan, who help corral the electronic freak-outs with primal rock rhythms. The result is a complicated tug of war between a forcefully electronic base and vibrating punk aftershocks. Even the band's name is a reflection of breaking down songs and noise into new components that can be rebuilt into unique rock structures. The name is also a way of warding away sensitive types, though, jokes Heino. "Part of the idea behind why the name was chosen was to keep people away," he cracks, "because anyone stupid enough to get offended by it I didn't want in the audience."

Although the Cripples weed out the easily ruffled (Heino admits to relishing the idea of writing his share of the lyrics about "stupid people"), the band isn't turning a cold, robotic shoulder to its audience. Even the noisiest of their experiments contains a pop sensibility, and the band wants to have fun more than it wants to exhibit some kind of severe pretentiousness. "We're not coming at [the band] from a high concept, we're coming at it from where we like stuff that's noisy but we don't like stuff that's too intellectually noisy," says Marshall. "A lot of American noise groups are all intellectual-based. We want to keep the riff going and we want to keep some semblance of structure and we also want to keep more of a song."