When I say that Ezee Tiger is a one-man band, I don't mean it in the style of, say, some major-label outcast doing his best Dylan on the old acoustic. Or that Ezee tickles the iMac under a fluorescent glow. I mean he's a one-man rock band--which, in typical genre phrasing, means Ezee plays drums, guitar, bass, and sings, all in the course of one song, both live and on his recordings. He crams what usually requires a two- to five-member lineup into the scrawny frame of a bike messenger from San Francisco named Anthony Petrovic. His music is a pandemonium of murky feedback, speaker-thrashing guitar and bass riffs, and slurred vocals--and yet somehow it all comes together with catchy melodies that threaten to lodge dangerously long in your memory.

Ezee's 2005 eponymous debut blasted out on the KimoSciotic label, home to such underground, art-damaged sonic experiments as Zeigenbock Kopf and Crack: We Are Rock. The 10 tracks take you light-speed through Petrovic's perpetually cluttered imagination. Songs like "Mumble" sound like a tour van turned sideways, instruments toppling over one another as Ezee wails over the top. Petrovic says the thin thread tying all his songs together is melody, whether it's within the manic metal of "For the Sweater Kids (For Hightower)" or the Spiritualized-on-a-crappy cassette concept of "Ballad of the Scooter Heshian [SP.]" "I like crazy noise but I also like melodies," he explains. "I guess My Bloody Valentine would be a big influence on that--where you can interpret it as all-out noise, but you can still hear a really pretty thing underneath it." Sure--but Petrovic's stuff definitely comes closer to the tumultuous dirge of the Load/Bulb Records rosters than the Creation catalog.

When Ezee plays, Petrovic dumps an arsenal of instruments all over the stage--moving across one piece at a time, jamming out and looping riffs, with each new sonorous texture more obese than the last. Finally, he bashes the hell out of a drum kit, bleating into the mic like a farm animal on its way to the slaughter. It's a manic feat to witness live, and an accomplishment Petrovic continues to build upon.