Deadbolt

You can read it right on the cover of all four Deadbolt albums: "Scariest Band in the World." If that's not convincing enough, consider this: these four middle-aged guys always wear sunglasses when they play! Man. Talk about tempting fate. It's only a matter of time before one of them trips over a speaker and crashes onto a hard club floor.

Harley Davidson, Les Vegas, R.A. MacLean, and 3rd Degree Burns do lots of other scary stuff on stage, too. Like, they cut things in half with an actual power saw! It's like having a whole two-stroke motorcycle engine jammed in your ear! Pretty scary! And what about that stinky toxic exhaust cloud that pours out of the saw? Incredibly unnerving! The band also does a lot of on-stage stuff with fire that you just know would be full-on catastrophic if any of them ever, like, moved closer. Les Vegas also does this death-defying "Snake Dance" with a five-foot long python snake. It's rubber, but still. If that snake ever, like, caught fire and melted on him or something, that'd be pretty scary.

"We're the kind of band you play when you're driving to Las Vegas," growls front man Harley Davidson (guitar / vocals/ "creepy organ"). "You've been dumped. You're drinking a six-pack. You're wearing a gun. That's when you pop us into your stereo. Then you know you're on a serious trip to danger."

Taking people on dangerous trips is a Deadbolt specialty. On 1994's "Shrunken Head" the band ventured into Voodoo territory, from which they barely escaped with their normal-sized heads. On 1995's "Tiki Man" they went to a luau gone terribly, terribly wrong. On 1996's "Tijuana Hit Squad" they headed south of the border in order to do something involving guns and blood that, on the jacket art, hardly looks like red paint at all. This year Deadbolt brought to their cringing fans "Zulu Death Mask," about the band's journey into a foreign land so dark and foreboding that on the disc's inside jacket photo you have to look really hard before you can even see the "Wild Animal Park" sign behind the rhino.

And through it all, like the Devil's Muzak, plays Deadbolt's signature sound: brooding, ominous guitar; throbbing, malevolent drums; harrowing, disgusting bass.

"We call the kind of music we play 'Voodoobilly,' " says Harley. "You got your rockabilly, your punkabilly, your psychobilly. Screw all that. We're voodoobilly. We're definitely on the churning, dark, creepy side of the Billy family."

Fair enough. After all, scariness doesn't always have to be of the "Oh my God, I can't believe that nice man eats babies!" variety. It can also be an, "Oh my God, I can't believe those four dorks drank all our beer!" sort of thing. So beware, boys and girls: Deadbolt's coming soon to a town near you. Hide your daughters. Hide your guns.

Hide your beer.

-- John Shore