As I've said before, my taste in music, like most people's, was vastly shaped by my parents. When they couldn't decide between exposing me to Bread and Carole King (my mom's soft-rock preference) or Gentle Giant and King Crimson (my dad's proggy wheelhouse), they settled on oldies, which is where my love for the wall of sound and the two-and-a half minute burst of hooks came from. Later, that sensibility would collide with alternative music and my dad's increasing brazenness in blasting Godley & Creme at family functions, and my tastes would eventually get set in stone.

You can run from your parents' musical predilections, or your mind can become warped, and you will find yourself burrowing deeper into their record collections.

When I asked Sean Downey, of the Fabulous Downey Brothers, how his band got started, he took it way back to the beginning, and the only really right answer that exists.

"It got started when my parents played the B-52s and Talking Heads and Devo at our dinner table," says Downey. "That was pretty much it. I got a guitar, and my brother got a drum set. It's the classic band story."

Years later, Sean and his brother Liam Downey would transform their punk and New Wave leanings into a bizarre and unpredictable band called the Fabulous Downey Brothers. Now a seven-piece art-rock fascination (joined by Sean's wife Chandra Farnsworth on lead vocals, as well as Louis Messina, Freddy Dobler, Alex Link and Josh Chin), the Fabulous Downey Brothers are approaching the once again trendy New Wave sound from a different direction than other current bands. They hit New Wave in the more hyperactive, spiky mode of early Devo and Oingo Boingo.

"We talk and think so much about what we do, as a band, that it hurts us sometimes," says Downey. "You really have to have something special going on to stand out. ... (That sound you were referencing about us), that spiky, warbly thing is zolo - Z-O-L-O. It's like a genre. I say ‘like' a genre, because it's also a fashion, but it's also a music genre. That's what we do. We do zolo. Not a lot of people know about that, maybe four hundred people."

Zolo is an oddly specific and unspecific subgenre that counts Devo, Sparks, Godley & Creme, and Split Enz, among the more famous of its ranks. With unbridled energy, chirping vocals, unpredictable arrangements and an intensely arty aesthetic, the Fabulous Downey Brothers surely fit the bill.

Onstage, the Fabulous Downey Brothers present something close to the level of performance art, with elaborate, vaguely upsetting costumes that might entail the band being painted head-to-toe and adorned with geometrical bathmats, or wearing neon goggles with googly eyes barring any sort of humanoid features. The aforementioned Josh Chin is the Fabulous Downey Brothers' dedicated technician for lights and visuals, and provides a dizzying variety of whacked-out images. Seeing a Fabulous Downey Brothers show can be exhilarating and exhausting, in all the best ways.

On June 6th, the Fabulous Downey Brothers will be releasing their new album, on Swoon Records, called Squiggle Dot Dot, and it's just as psychotic and joyous as their previous work. However, this Saturday will find them opening up for local dance-rock favorites Mirrorgloss, who are releasing an album of their own - also on Swoon Records - called Yeah. It'll be an absurd night of art and disco and maniacal gyrating, not to be missed by anyone who enjoys the occasional melding and merging of brain tissue and dancing shoes, which I should hope would equal out to nobody.

Fabulous Downey Brothers w/ Mirrorgloss, Ava D Jor, DJ Eddie Bermuda, DJ Toya Harris, Saturday, May 23, 9 p.m., $5, New Frontier, 301 E. 25th St., Tacoma, 253.572.4020