If everybody likes a band, chances are it isn't a very good band. You might like No Sheers Ted. Then again, you might not. And those of you that don't simply confirm that this is an extraordinary band. Besides, the band doesn't care.

"We just wanna play music," says frontman Joe Fox-Boyd. "Who cares if anyone likes it? We just wanna get up and play." That may sound a bit cavalier, but the band is clearly on its own trip - a trip it refers to as the post-jam revolution.

No Sheers Ted is a lo-fi conceptual rock trio that shadow boxes with the fundamental idea of melody before blowing it out of the water. It's magically delicious and pleasantly nuts.

Composed of Fox-Boyd, drummer Michael Bulger - who inadvertently named the band when he drunkenly slurred the phrase "no tears shed" - and bassist Jason Curtis, NST slips through every available crack when attempting to categorize its gentle cacophony. It's too heavy for folk, the song structures are too fractured to be rock, there's too much mirth for it to be blue, it's too nice to be evil, yet too subversive to be nice. The best you can do is call it a Tin Pan Alley jam with a rusty halo.

"When I'm writing," says Fox-Boyd, "I'm not trying to write a weird song. I'm just writing what I think a song is." These songs take shape with the band hanging on a particular component, listening for it to slowly take shape. This sort of attentiveness comes with time. The band itself may be relatively new, but its members have been playing together for some time; Bulger and Fox-Boyd have known each other since kindergarten.

"We didn't get along too well in kindergarten," Bulger says. "But around fourth grade we became really good friends."

Despite its obtuse leanings and tenuous beginning, the band is unified. So is its sound.

"Sometimes it comes straight out of the box and we're rockin' right away with an almost funk vibe... a lot of energy," says Bulger. "Some songs we build up. We'll have like a two-chord vehicle, or even just one chord. We'll all just be thinking about B minor."

"It's always been about improvisation," he says. "We would basically get together and someone would just start playing a minor pentatonic and we'd all just sort of join in. I'm sure you could go in there and label changes, like where we're augmenting the chord for a little while here and there. But it was never thought out, it just sorta happened."

Trying to make mathematical or rational sense of No Sheers Ted is pointless. The band tries anyway, but in the end, is as baffled and amused by its music as the audience.

"It's just kinda masked in this nonsense kind of stuff," says Fox-Boyd, who co-composed the music for John Borek's production of "Moose Murders," considered the worst play in Broadway history. "To me it's not nonsense. Everything I'm saying means something to me. It's kind of a process; put down the chord progression, tweak the chord progression, find a melody, put it in the chords, create the guitar part. You know, sit around with a couple beers, come up with a line, come up with an idea for the song - a story, something clever." That method allows for a kind of free interpretation for the audience, and for those in the band.

Bulger likes how it works out. "There's always just enough ambiguity," he says. "The lyricist is thinking about something, but everybody who hears or reads the lyrics is left to not take it literally. Everybody can relate to it." Or they'll be like, "What's soup filet?'" in regards to one of the lyrics that Fox-Boyd explains away glibly.

"It rhymed with another word," he says.

Lyrical oddity aside, the band's talent lies in its ability to listen to its music, give it what it wants, tend to its wounds. Though about as far removed form swirling hippie culture, No Sheers Ted is the ultimate jam band that isn't a jam band.

For example, just spin Coltrane's "One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note" from 1965. Those cats are all over the place, but you'll never hear anyone accuse Coltrane or McCoy Tyner or Jimmy Garrison or Elvin Jones of jamming.

"Our only restraints are in our heads," says Curtis. "I mean, you get self-conscious. You still wonder what the audience is thinking about the sound. Because in a sense, you still want to entertain. Our best is yet to come, when we're going to find this great medium where anyone can derive some emotion from it."

The band itself is looking for that emotion to show up. Bulger explains when that is: "When it stops and we all giggle," he says.

No Sheers Ted

w/Electric Organic

Monty's Krown, 875 Monroe Ave

Saturday, January 17

10 p.m. | $3 | 271-7050