The older Iget, the less interest I have in music taking itself so seriously, or having other people chastise me for not always taking music seriously. On occasions when I've DJ'd, I always put on a mash-up of "Rockin' Robin" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to gauge the room. One-hundred percent of the time, there is at least one person who tells me to turn it the fuck off.

But music is designed to accommodate every mood, including silliness. A large portion of teenage, intermediate music education came in the form of They Might Be Giants, Ween and the Flaming Lips - all bands that have been plagued with the dreaded and erroneous label of "novelty band" by those poor people who just have no patience for silliness or humor in their music.

All of this in mind, The Plodes just blazed right up my alley on first listen. The Vancouver, B.C., band's debut album, A Foot Was As Long As... A Foot!, is packed to the brim with odd ideas and unbridled energy. The songs whip by, with none of them even approaching the two-minute mark, riding high on punk rhythms and fiery accordion.

"I'm stimulated by the absurdity and the stupidity of something," says lead singer and guitarist Reid Blakley. "I just put out what I think is an interesting idea for a song."

Topics on deck for The Plodes include how obnoxious unicorns are ("Unicorn"), being small and living in jars ("Now I'm Really Tiny and I Live in a Jar"), shoe maintenance ("Did You Find Something Weird on the Bottom of My Shoe?"), what the preposition "of" is in different languages ("Of!"), and how uncomfortable it is to talk with a doctor about your penis ("Penis").

In the middle of the album, there's a five-second song called "It Sucked So Much."

"I have a friend in Calgary who fronts a vegan-anarcho-feminist-queer - I think that's all the adjectives - grindcore-powerviolence band called Rape Revenge," says Blakley. "(‘It Sucked So Much') was actually inspired by a couple of their songs, where it just lasts a few seconds, like (makes guitar noise), and then the lyrics would just be ‘FUCK YOU!' or something like that. ... That was also an inspiration for the next song on the album, which is ‘You Treat Me Poorly and It Makes Me Upset.' It's just a very grindcore-influenced, improvisational track. When we play that one live, we pick out a member of the audience to sing it."

There's a sense, on the album, that anything goes. Any wackadoo idea The Plodes want to explore is explored. "Kissy Giraffes," for instance, poses a world where giraffes loves to kiss on things, and we love to kiss them back because their eyelashes get all fluttery. Really, though, I suspect that the song was written purely from the standpoint of like how good the words "kissy" and "giraffes" sound shouted next to each other.

"We're not really a comedy band, intentionally," says Blakley. "But, most of my lyrics are in some way intended to make people laugh. ... A lot of my favorite bands, I discovered them long after they were famous, or long after they'd grown out of their goofy phase.

"My inspiration for going into music was actually Barenaked Ladies. My favorite album of theirs is Gordon, which actually came out the year I was born, in 1992. Their whole image, at the time, was just goofy kids singing about whatever, and a lot of people - especially in North America, I find - just have disdain for that, for some reason. I can sort of understand why, this cynicism, or they just take music very seriously, but all of my favorite bands have an element of humor and they have an attitude of, ‘Oh, what the hell, let's do this.'"

Do The Plodes ever worry about garnering naysayers for those same reasons?

"All the time," laughs Blakley.

Haters are gonna hate, as the kidz say. But, for me, The Plodes are kindred spirits. Blakley informs me that they'll have cassette versions of their debut album for sale at their Le Voyeur show, with the Joy Division-esque Gay Ghost and Olympia rockers November Witch. Grab a copy and take a journey through the funny, chaotic id of The Plodes.

THE PLODES, w/ Gay Ghost and November Witch, 6 p.m., Sunday, Aug. 25, Le Voyeur, 404 E. Fourth Ave., Olympia, $5, 360.943.5710