Gross Ghost

Carrboro’s promising indie-rock band Gross Ghost sometimes includes musicians such as Rob Dipatri on lead guitar and T.J. Maiani on drums, but the duo of guitarist Mike Dillon and bassist Tre Acklen is its constant heart. Dillon, formerly of the roots band Old Bricks and the disco-punk Spader, met Acklen on the late-night house party circuit. They named their band Gross Ghost in honor of those last-men-standing at the after-party, providing an amiably debauched soundtrack for their drunken wee-hours adventures.

It took Gross Ghost a minute to figure out what they were: Their developmental music was filthy and fragmented—a speaker-scorching brand of noise rock that hinted, remotely, at songs. But they showed tremendous progression from 2009’s debut LP, Miggaz, to 2011’s Wicked Game EP, which the Indy called “one of the Triangle’s most delightful bits of music this year.”

Gross Ghost’s impulse to delight rather than confront blossoms on their new LP, Brer Rabbit, a lean and amenable record that braids together strands of lo-fi garage scuzz, sweet ’60s pop, and gently propulsive ’90s indie, all sparkly with reverb and humming with room tone. With the band’s boozy abandon tempered by plumb-line songwriting, the end result is somewhere between Cass McCombs and Built to Spill—understated vocal writing meets understated guitar theatrics to produce overstatedly catchy results.

Here, scene casualties make good, creating a record that sounds as fine at 4 p.m. on a lazy Sunday as it does at 4 a.m. on a sizzled Saturday. —Brian Howe