Don’t even try categorizing the new band Gram Rabbit

The desert giveth and the desert taketh away.

That’s an appropriately biblical way to view the emergence of Gram Rabbit, a band that’s big on Jesus-and-the-Devil lyrics and that hails from the same desert town, Joshua Tree, where Cosmic American Music visionary Gram Parsons met his maker in 1973.

But don’t be misled by that connection, nor by the name Gram Rabbit itself, nor by the fact that the two leaders found a vocal bond singing Parsons songs. Rootsy country-rock it’s not.

There is some of that. There’s some of many things in the kaleidoscopic swirl of “Music to Start a Cult To,” Gram Rabbit’s debut album. The music ranges from the Old West-dusted “Dirty Horse” to the twangy, tribal, Jefferson Airplane-style freak-out of “Disco #2” to a gentle Radiohead/Byrds hybrid, “Kill a Man,” about the desensitizing capacity of TV news. There’s slinky electro-lounge, and a psychedelic rap in “Cowboys and Aliens.”

“It’s whatever inspires us at the moment,” says singer Jesika Von Rabbit, who fronts the band with singer-guitarist Todd Rutherford. “I want to write songs that are gonna get people excited when they’re out and they’ve had a couple of drinks and they’re ready to go and it’s like, ‘Give me something!’ I want it to be fun and catchy, but I want it to be deep too.”

It’s very early in the game -- the album, on the New York independent label Stinky Records, comes out Tuesday, and the band has played just a handful of shows outside of Joshua Tree. Von Rabbit and Rutherford still have their day jobs, she as a receptionist at a gym in Yucca Valley, he in food preparation at a Joshua Tree cafe.

But the preliminary indicators look good: nice reviews in the alternative press, a touch of radio play, a spotlight pick in the trade paper Radio & Records. BMI, the venerable royalties organization, has selected Gram Rabbit for its Pick of the Month program, which showcases new artists and has already spotlighted such bands on the rise as Keane and Rilo Kiley. Gram Rabbit’s show at the Echo on Monday, the midpoint of a five-show August residency at the club, is the designated BMI night.

“We try to present bands that have commercial appeal but are also on the cutting edge of what’s going on,” says Tony George of BMI. “The thing about Gram Rabbit is that it’s almost uncategorizable. It’s so different and unique and special that people here thought we should give them a shot.... It’s such a weird confluence of styles.”

Weird indeed. On stage at the Echo earlier this week, Von Rabbit cut a Nancy Sinatra-like figure in a backless salmon jumpsuit, and at one point she removed her fuzzy Doris Day hat and donned a pair of rabbit ears.

With second guitarist Tracy Lyons-Tarr and sample-maker Travis Cline supplementing the two leaders, the band took the music up a notch, and they appear ready to claim a place in the line of self-reliant, independent-minded artists who germinated in Southern California’s deserts, from Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart in the 1960s to Queens of the Stone Age in the ‘90s.

“You can’t help but be changed there,” says Rutherford, who moved to Joshua Tree from San Francisco in 2000. “It was my first time in the desert, and it’s such a mystical place and it has such a strong vibe.... “

“You feel your mind being opened up to the paranormal, the cosmic, the psychic, the spiritual,” adds Von Rabbit, sitting at a corner table at the Echo before Monday’s show. “The aliens, the cowboys, the dead Indian spirits, all of that. It feels like you’re on Mars.”

Gram Rabbit’s two principals were each brought to Joshua Tree by a mutual friend who was assembling a musical project. Both were ready for a change.

Von Rabbit, who grew up in Green Bay, Wis., and had fronted a band in Minneapolis, was frustrated after two years of trying her luck in Los Angeles.

Rutherford, a native of Porterville in the Sierra foothills, was similarly dissatisfied with his options after moving to the Bay Area. But things clicked in Joshua Tree.

“It was just so amazing when I went down to the desert and saw Jesika for the first time and heard her sing,” says Rutherford, 28.

“I knew something was there, I knew I had to chase after it.”

With his taste for electronic and space-rock and her pan-pop sensibilities (punk to Woodstock to “Willy Wonka”), the field was wide open.

“We never set out to say, ‘We’re gonna sound like this, we’re gonna be this kind of band,’ ” says Von Rabbit, 29, whose stage name (like that of the band) stems from her obsession with Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” “It’s like ‘anything goes,’ basically. Whatever comes up and we like it. There’s never been a bracket on it.”

“I kind of hope that’s the new fad,” Rutherford says. “If anything comes from Gram Rabbit it’s that you can drop the scenes and you can use your imagination and you can be creative and you can do whatever you want.”

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Gram Rabbit

Where: The Echo, 1822 Sunset Blvd., Echo Park

When: 10:30 p.m. every Monday in August

Ends: Aug. 30

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 413-8200