As a general rule, small, remote college towns breed the most interesting bands, because they’re overstuffed with bored, smart kids looking for a way to get up to some mischief. Muncie, IN, home to Ball State University, bred the peculiarly named Everthus the Deadbeats, who begat the peculiarly titled Addicts Stuck in Traffic, which is…peculiar. There is almost nothing on this six-track album that connects it to current trends in popular music; the closest comparison is the Red Krayola’s fractured take on art rock, but the album is nowhere near as willfully bizarre and noisy as Mayo Thompson and crew usually are. If anything, in fact, songs like “A Lotta Faith in This Product,” with its cyclic, singsongy melody, and “She,” with its start-stop rhythm and stuttering hook, are really catchy in a quirky, detached way, but they’re still far too outré for the average fan of, say, Beck or the Flaming Lips. So Everthus the Deadbeats might suffer the fate, as the saying goes, of falling between two stools: too freaky for the incoming freshmen, but too normal for the weirdos at the college radio station. – Stewart Mason
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