These days, when Spencer Kelley talks, I listen.

Kelley is the frontman of Basemint, a T-town indie rock throwback with all the right moves - and quite possibly my favorite thing going in Tacoma these days. Yes, better than the "scrap metal collectors" that try to make off with my lawnmower when it's left unattended. Better than those crazy Click! billboards featuring Thane and Patricia Lecy-Davis. Better than MSM sandwiches and Sputnik Donuts (though just barely, people).

Almost, I sometimes fear, better than Tacoma itself.

But that's a discussion for another day. When Kelley reached out a few weeks back, drawing my attention to the show Saturday at The New Frontier with Chain and the Gang, his band Basemint, and an appearance by DJ Dub Narcotic - aka Oly's own Calvin Johnson - it was a no-brainer to take note.

The truly impressive thing about all of this, however, is neither Calvin Johnson nor Kelley's Basemint is the real story here. The story is Ian Svenonius' Chain and the Gang - yet another notch in a storied artist and musician's belt, and an unsurprising contextual outgrowth of the man himself.

Svenonius is an artist in the truest sense of the word. Regularly described (endearingly) as a mouthpiece and even "slyly legendary," Svenonius has written books and hosted online talk shows, but is best known for fronting bands that teetered on the artistic ledge, from his first D.C. outfit Nation of Ulysses, which made it its goal to destroy the "corrupt medium" of rock and roll, to the Make Up and the band's self-ascribed genre "Gospel Yeh-Yeh," to Cupid Car Club, to Weird War, to his newest incarnation, Chain and the Gang - which incorporates a strict set of musical rules that materialize into familiar, reductionist, prison-blues tropes, a call and response backbone and a driving R&B feel.

But the band is as much - if not more - about the tongue in cheek, freedom is fucked message.

Chain and Gang - through Svenonius' still-prime sneer and swagger - emanate like a band that knows the score. Their main conceptual point: liberty breeds destruction in the form of "fast food, bad architecture, militarism and rampant greed." The Dream is a lost cause. Chain and the Gang have come to terms with this, and they're done playing. If this is what liberty is all about, they'd rather be locked up - and you can throw away the fucking.

"I think that's always a good way to start - the concept," says Svenonius of Chain and the Gang, and how an idea becomes a band. "If you're just emulating a sound, you're kind of emulating something that's already happened. It's not a very good genesis.

"(Chain and the Gang is) obviously based on the metaphor of a chain gang, and our relationship with freedom," Svenonius continues. "Freedom is an interesting idea."

Svenious' Chain and the Gang isn't just railing and fighting against the freedom that births strip malls and ideological wars, but also the freedom that has broken down the strict ideologies associated with music, and made everything artistically fair game - recent developments that on the surface seem like progress, but on the whole have a way of feeling painfully suffocating.

"The band is kind of about refuting that freedom. There used to be a lot of rules around music. Now, anything is acceptable," says Svenonius. "The human endeavor is kind of crushing us. Chain and the Gang is about a lack of that freedom, and strict rules and references."

Recently, Svenonius has been in Olympia, recording a follow up to 2009's Chain and the Gang debut, Down with Freedom... Up with Chains – released on K Records. The band's forthcoming new release, also to be released by K, will carry similar weight as the first, and employ "the same approach, just more developed," according to Svenonius. The new record will also include the collaborative contributions of Tacoma's own Spencer Kelley, among others.

"Over the last week Chain and the Gang have been camped out here at K, transforming Dub Narcotic studio into their mad scientist laboratory for developing new recipes of soul garage dance beats and over-the-top wordplay fun," Calvin Johnson tells me. "They dig the now, blending it with the best ideas from past eras. Tacoma is the perfect place for Chain and the Gang to hideout for a spell, recharge their batteries then ignite on stage. Gonna be a boffo show."

Truer words have rarely been spoken.

Chain and the Gang

with Nightbeats, Basemint, DJ Dub Narcotic
Saturday, July 3, 9 p.m., $5,
The New Frontier Lounge, 301 E. 25th St., Tacoma
253.572.4020