No matter how jaded I sometimes feel about music, there's always something that comes along and takes me completely by surprise. I think the last thing to have that effect on me was St. Vincent - known for jarringly jumping back and forth from pop to folk to crunchy space-funk. Noise like that was something I hadn't heard before, at least not like that.

Portland's Mr. Frederick is similarly surprising with how it mixes genres, but unlike St. Vincent, not only had I never heard this combination before, if I had thought about it I would have assumed that the result would be borderline intolerable.

There's always room to be wrong.

Mr. Frederick is a dizzying soup made up of power pop, chamber pop, rap, metal, rap-metal, Celtic rock, folk, and punk. It's practically indescribable, but I'll give it a shot. The songs generally start off high energy, with lead singer Justin Stimson trading off between a rap and a kind of metal wail. In the background, banjos and accordions are fighting with shredding axes and laser synths. After a while, one style will seem to have beaten out the others, and we'll settle comfortably into whatever the song has become - before everything comes crashing to a cacophonic finish and we're left shaking our heads, wondering how it all came together.

"I kind of like to call it ‘adventure-rock,'" says Stimson. He's made a conscious effort to avoid the monotony of the verse-chorus-verse-etcetera of most pop music, preferring instead the adventure of never knowing where a song will lead.

"I've always appreciated music like that," says Stimson. "You know, the kind that keeps you guessing and paying attention."

His influences could be seen as acts like Frank Zappa or NoMeansNo, but their similarities only exist in their utter originality - in their way of always keeping you guessing.

Choose your own adventure Friday at Le Voyeur.

[Le Voyeur, Mr. Frederick with Dead Cinema, Friday, Jan. 15, 9 p.m., no cover, 404 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia, 360.943. 5710]