POP MUSIC REVIEW : Grifters Put Their Stamp on Distortion

The Grifters don’t seem care so much about moving the masses as just getting through the day. And for this band of Memphis slackers--looking a little more worn and menacing than most of their indie-band peers, like your older brother’s slightly disreputable friends--a day apparently can be a difficult thing.

From all indications, the group’s set at the Alligator Lounge on Wednesday was designed as it went along, but inadvertently or not, it emerged as a musical representation of the passage from bleary awakening to charged activity to the onset of nightmares.

The Grifters’ dense volumes of squalling distortion owe a debt to everyone from Sonic Youth to Pavement to the Meat Puppets to R.E.M., but the band really doesn’t sound quite like anyone else. The spasms and shudders, the sudden halts and redistributions of sonic weight, seemed random at first, but they were too precisely placed to be written off as deconstructive anarchy. These guys have chops to spare, but after five years they’re still operating at the purest levels of underground enterprise, which means you’ll have to come to them.