Nashville’s Jeff the Brotherhood has been doing its mutant pop thing since 2001, but the duo’s habit-forming, genre-bending jams flew under the radar until fairly recently. Brothers Jake and Jamin Orrall—Jeff’s not here, maaan—served time in the short-lived sensation Be Your Own Pet, and they’ve released a goodly number of CD-Rs and cassettes through their own Infinity Cat imprint. But it was last year’s Heavy Days that finally pricked everyone’s ears.

A 30-minute tour of pretty much every good thing that’s happened to rock in the past 40 years, Heavy Days swings from stoner riffage to pop-punk sweetness to yelpy dissonance and back again, sometimes in a single song.

Jake jokes that he shares a “telepathic communication system” with his brother, which might hold more truth than he knows—it’s hard to imagine two guys so skillfully cherry-picking pop’s past without some mystical access to each other’s pleasure centers.

At the very least, they’ve been raiding from each other’s record collections, those dusty stratifications starring Nirvana, the Wipers, the Ramones, Thin Lizzy, Jay Reatard and Fu Manchu. Weird list, you say? Well, the Orrall brothers are so damn dialed in that they manage to synthesize those bands’ trademark sounds into… [READ MORE]