Year of the Scavenger Sings of Hard Times

"We're not under the illusion that people will buy music anymore," Cody Litkey says, describing the business model (or anti-business model) of his band Year of the Scavenger.

Instead of charging for their music, the trio plans to give it away through their Web site, www.yearofthescavenger.com.

"We want to record and release as fast as we can, so everything stays fresh," Litkey explains. "And we want to do it for free: Record, mix, release, repeat."

The band owns most of their own recording equipment, so aside from mixing fees and Web site bandwidth, there's virtually no overhead, and if all goes as planned, they'll release about two EPs a year. They open the floodgates this week when they post their self-titled full-length debut online in advance of a Cactus Club performance Friday night, Nov. 14.

If the band's fast-and-cheap distribution model seems derived from the Dischord Records ethos, it's no coincidence. The band was united in part by its shared love for D.C.-styled post-hardcore, an influence that manifests itself in the group's feral guitars and Litkey's full-lunged bellows, which evoke Ian MacKaye at his most red-faced. Year of the Scavenger doesn't just limit itself to Fugazi's dire playbook-the band's hard-charging rock 'n' roll licks seem indebted more to bands like Jawbox and Drive Like Jehu-but like Fugazi, their songs arrive with the force of a swift punch to the gut.

The band's emphasis on '90s post-hardcore separates them from much of Milwaukee's local rock scene, but their bleak lyrical focus helps them fit right in. Like their peers in bands like Freight, Pigs on Ice and Father Phoenix, Year of the Scavenger paints the world as a desolate place where the government is unable to provide for the masses, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Year of the Scavenger's debut is filled with references to such desperation-"I need contraband/ I need to get my hands on what I want," Litkey shouts out, for instance, on "Jailhouse Education"-but it's the band's name that best sets the scene. It was taken from David Bowie's 1974 bummer Diamond Dogs, the glam album Bowie set not in some fantastical sci-fi reality, but rather a beleaguered, Orwellian wasteland where children and animal alike forage for food.

Though there's an obvious irony to a band that happily gives away its music christened with such a dog-eat-dog moniker, Litkey found the name perfect for the times.

"As we were naming the band, there were all those rice shortages and food riots," Litkey recalls. "The name just really captured this feeling of the apocalypse."

Year of the Scavenger plays a 10 p.m. album-release show at the Cactus Club on Friday, Nov. 14, with White, Wrench, Conservatory and Molitor.