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Deadboy and the Elephantmen perform "Stop, I'm Already Dead"

As a kid, signer/guitarist Dax Riggs became obsessed with David Lynch’s masterpiece of Victorian-era dignity and pain, The Elephant Man, via its frequent HBO airtime in the 1980s. This obsession has followed him through life. Not only did he derive the name of his band, Deadboy and the Elephantmen, from the film but his music also bears a thematic kinship to John Merrick’s disfigured beauty lost in an incompassionate world. Following a youth spent singing in the cult favorite swamp-metal crew Acid Bath, Riggs hooked up with drummer Tessie Burnet in 2004 to put the music he’d been creating into action, and Deadboy and the Elephantmen was begun. 2006 has seen the guitar and drums duo issue the outstanding We Are Night Sky (Fat Possum), which mixes stripped-down, serene blues and riff-heavy, lysergic hard rock and earned some of the biggest buzz at this year’s SXSW music conference. Riggs’ deep, perfectly rough voice is sort of a cross between Mark Lanagan and Peter Murphy, and is the ideal vehicle for these songs, as they are both dark and confessional and bombastically punk-blues.

Thursday, July 20 at 9pm. Soundlab, 110 Pearl Street (883-3209).