For those who know me, it should come as no surprise that I’m not exactly an expert on rap. I enjoy some of it, sure. Mostly, rap that appeals to me is attached to music that would be compelling regardless of whether its accompanying vocals are rapping or singing — pop music, I guess. That’s my own cross to bare. I just can’t enjoy rap unless it’s pop in disguise.

That being said, Revengers are not pop. They’re also not rap, really. I’d call it beat poetry dirges. Depending on what song you hear, the dominant influence may be as varied as heavy metal, avant-classical or country. What remains a constant, besides the rapped vocals, is the dark haze that hangs over the band’s first full-length album, Scraps on the Badlands, which will be officially released this Saturday at Hell’s Kitchen. Every song on the disc sounds transmitted from wind-blown plains and abandoned barns that lay under an orange sky.

Doom and gloom seems to be the prevailing theme of Revengers. Speaking with Dale Coleman, one half of Revengers’ lyrical and vocal team, he notes Tom Waits as an influence. Suddenly it all makes more sense. Tom Waits’ continued exploration of nightmarish scenes in his music can suddenly and certainly be heard on Revengers’ debut album, but the group’s musical influences don’t stop there. “Everyone in Revengers has a really diverse musical background,” says Coleman. “We were never hip-hop kids, so to speak. My favorite bands are The Clash, Tom Waits, Henry Rollins, Johnny Cash and the Pixies. We always wanted to be honest to ourselves. It sounds a little different, I guess, because we’re a little different.”

What distinguishes the album far more than the music is the lyrics. Scraps on the Badlands is almost an hour long, with almost each song stretching past five minutes — some past the eight-minute mark. All the songs are finely sketched studies in grief, fear, uneasy bravado, and violence. They vacillate between character studies; exercises in style; and what sound like painful, furiously scrawled journal entries. It’s never easy figuring out what’s autobiographical and what’s pure fiction, nor should we be so presumptuous to assume. But it’s gripping nonetheless.

The album is surrounded by loss, as Coleman informs me. Its producer, Tom Pfaeffle, died over the summer in a freak accident. Since the early ‘90s, Pfaeffle had been an important force in the Seattle music scene. “I always equate his name to one of the silent heroes of the Seattle scene,” says Coleman. “We consider him [an honorary] Revenger, and the album is dedicated to him.”

As if that wasn’t devastating enough, Pfaeffle’s death came just two weeks before Danny “D-Child” Cline’s passing. Cline was a former member of Biznautics, the group that spawned both Revengers and Nasty Left. “It hits you like a ton of bricks,” Coleman continues. “That’s a lot of what our record is about, is standing your ground in the face of hardship and not getting beaten up by the world, so we kind of had to live by that.”

Besides their haunting music and poetic words, Revengers have also won me over by their pride in Tacoma. “That’s also what our record is about,” says Coleman. “It’s about the city of Tacoma — just a love letter, or maybe a ghost story about Tacoma.”

It’s not hard to read all of the iron and blood — the smoke and steam — that permeates Scraps on the Badlands as a surrogate Tacoma, or to hear that frantic rap as the collective internal dialogue of Tacoma’s citizens. Tacoma lives most of the year under low skies, and maybe it takes a band like Revengers to really put it on paper.

I realize now I haven’t made this record sound like much fun. The truth is, it’s enthralling — a truly surprising album that manages to upend every expectation. It rewards multiple listens, which is surprisingly rare, and it appreciates over time. As I mentioned earlier, Revengers will be holding their CD release party at Hell’s Kitchen this Saturday. It’s the second to last weekend before Hell’s Kitchen makes the move downtown, as if you needed another reason to make it out.

But how ‘bout one last reason?

A group with as much integrity and invention as Revengers doesn’t come along very often. Let them rap, for you, their dust-soaked dirges.

[Hell’s Kitchen, with Blanco Bronco, Trip the Light Fantastic, Saturday, Nov. 21, 5 p.m., all ages, $10 cover includes new Revengers album, 3829 Sixth Ave., Tacoma, 253.759.6003]