Thundering out of the heartland like twenty thousand midwestern mongols -- that is, polite mongols, who stop to swap insurance information -- Matthew Grimm & The Red Smear are Iowa’s newest bastards of rock & roll and the sworn enemies of all things genteel and orthodox. Grimm, with the venerable guidance of producer/guitarist Pete Anderson, underscores that with the subtlety of a clown-hammer in the blistering, vulgar, impolite record, Dawn’s Early Apocalypse, his first since departing New York, and the pseudo-legendary band he co-founded, The Hangdogs, for his native Iowa.

Based in Iowa City, the Red Smear plays ass-rattling rock meat-grindered with hefty doses of power pop, punk and habaneros. Fueling the band’s attack are Grimm’s foul-mouthed disdain for a whored and corporatized status quo and disrespect for everything august and sacred, which prompted the Iowa City Press-Citizen to call him the “hardest-hitting leftfielder this side of Manny Ramirez.”

The other guys, far less didactic and way easier to sit adjacent to on a barstool, have joined Grimm’s Quixotic revolution ostensibly for the free beer. After the Hangdogs became a revolving door in their latter years, Grimm conveived the Red Smear as a loose, modular aggregation of anyone who could tolerate him long enough to play his songs and help him avoid the namby-pamby “singer/songwriter” label.

Road Smear members include former Hangdogs and current American Ambulance bassist Rob Gottstein, a weary and insecure veteran of the NYC punk scene; former Ghost Rockets bassist Mick Hargreaves (currrently whoring his own solo record), Iowa City hitter James Robinson, Hangdogs road drummer Dave Stengel, veteran of countless Hoboken bands, and fellow Hobokenite and former Gefkens and Rocket guitar ace and vocalist Matt Azzarto.

The Iowa City-based core band includes:

Eric Straumanis: unbeknownst to each other, Grimm and fellow Cedar County native Straumanis grew up nine miles from each other, graduating a year apart. An actual wall-plaque-bearing psychiatrist, Eric has played with the David Zollo & the Body Electric, Kelly Pardekooper, a billion others, and fronted his own band under the aegis of Eric Straumanis & the Douglas Leaders, the latter a brand of toilet at John Svec’s studio in Iowa City. Renowned as one of the best guitarists in Iowa, Eric’s talents are utterly wasted in his bassist duties with the Red Smear.

Jason Berge: Berge, as he must ONLY be referred to, cut his teeth playing guitar with punk rock bands in his native Sioux City, then went on to co-found Iowa City’s much-mourned Skunk River Bandits, who made one and a half records before stopping in the middle of one a year and a half ago, then completing it this past May. If you give him any line from 14 seasons of The Simpsons, he will give you the next line in the script, in character. His interests include spooning and test marketing.

Matt Winegardner: Central/eastern Iowa’s go-to-hitter, it’s easier to ask Matt who he doesn’t play with, though those with whom he does regularly include Brother Trucker, Kelly Pardekooper, Randy Burke and a bajillion more. Also, because of his name’s Hebraic similarities, Matt holds the title of the honorary Jew in the Red Smear, a comforting designation to Grimm, who has never before played in a band without a Semitic brother. Between shows, Matt is a real live farmer near his hometown of New Sharon, Iowa.

Lyle Hogue: The bassist for Brother Trucker, Lyle has filled in on bass in Eric’s absence due to getting married and spawning. He equals out the bald-headed-and-bearded/young-and-pretty ratio in the band. Most impressively, Lyle was once clocked by cops, conscious, at a .24 blood-alchohol content.

MC3: aka Dave Lincoln, aspiring hip-hop white boy who takes the featured vocal on the breakdown of the blazing new Smear anti-Caucasian song "White." Dave hails from Cedar Falls, and that's all we really know about him other than he hangs out at The Mill with Shoey.

For the purposes of Dawn’s Early Apocalypse, recorded in Burbank, Calif., in February 2005, the Red Smear included Anderson, drummer Josh Day, bassist Rob Douglas, keyboardist Mike Murphy and guitarist Charlton Pettus, plus featured vocal performances by veteran studio virtuosos Dusty Wakeman and Doug Pettibone.

Loosely confederated in 2004, the band has been steadily defining their sound to not suck so much, bound in a deeper spiritual sense by an affinity for cartoons and watching girls make out. Together, they hope to play for money someday, that and defeat the forces of evil. And maybe get a Playstation.