Kendall Pavan Photo

Deer Tick: World-weary beyond their years.

Deer Tick

With Jonny Corndawg and The Backwater Racket. 7 p.m., Nov. 5. Manic Productions at The Space, 250 Treadwell St., Bldg. H, Hamden. $10. 203-288-6400, thespace.tk, manicproductions.org.

Deer Tick's recent release, Born On Flag Day, closes with a hidden track — a raucous one-take cover of the suicidal love song, "Good Night Irene," with bottles clanking and gear flying. As the song fades into drunken cheers and clattering, someone starts up the riff to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama." The album ends before the song gets going, so we never learn how John J. McCauley III, Deer Tick's singer and leader, might turn the screws on the southern anthem.

Deer Tick is premised on McCauley's voice, which suggests a hard-bitten persona, a sort of musical Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name, all squinted eyes and chewed-off cheroots, with a band that provides all the cactus and tumbleweed-filled landscapes it can. On "Little White Lies," the band breaks out the slide guitar twang while McCauley sings, "I'm not so sure that I even am alive."

Despite the country hallmarks, McCauley stops short of rounding out the refrain "Please let me be lonely tonight" with "lonesome," a demonstration of either subtle restraint or ambivalence towards the full panoply of country signifiers from which Deer Tick draws.

The polished sheen of pop-country seems to require the full-time attention of its practitioners, but country's raw and raspy flavors have had a durable half-life throughout popular music, often as a playful costume to be taken up and set aside, with or without a broad ironic wink. You can see why: The strength of country's conventions give a band plenty to play with, a persona drenched in whiskey and ornery longing.

But a succession of bands has also taken up the sound in earnest, notably the alt-country movement spearheaded by Son Volt. More recently, bands like Those Darlins and Phosphorescent have made hay with the sound of energetically-strummed guitars tuned wide, smooth bass that can be played on a double and a voice ragged enough to carry a tune. Deer Tick has neither the anarchic sloppiness of the Darlins nor the lustrous, exhausted sweetness of Phosphorescent's perfect album of Willie Nelson covers. But what it does have, in spades, is McCauley's acerbic, vinegary yowl.

McCauley's voice is so overpowering that you wonder if he ever had any choice in genre: Perhaps there is nothing else one can do with such an adenoidal burr, like a dust devil rattling dry leaves, a fuzz-edged radio signal at a hundred miles distance, a Post-it note trapped by the blades of a fan, and, when he really gets going, a masonry drill headed straight for your teeth. He gives even the ballads a hectoring tone.

But being sawed to death by ardor has its own appeal, especially with the right harmonies.

The steely-eyed, sandpaper-voiced persona isn't all an act: McCauley can be as taciturn as any Eastwood hero. When reached by e-mail for this article, the only thing McCauley would comment on was the band's name, and then only to bluntly insist that the name meant nothing more than the arachnid.

So in the end, the music must speak for itself. To judge from the negligible difference in vinegar and vigor between the single take "Irene" and the rest of the album, Deer Tick can deliver the goods.

Request "Good Night Irene," at The Space on Thursday — and come prepared to be drilled.

This Manic Productions show was previously scheduled for July 23 at the Wallingford American Legion. Tickets purchased for that show will be honored at The Space.