Slugging back bottles of Lager in a downtown bar, Deuce Gibb, Mike Mead and Rej Troup seem right at home. Here, offstage, hooting with one another around a corner table, the three are a spectacle equal to their playful on-stage personas: Larger-than-life characters feverish with so much youth that it betrays any scrap of veteran rock and roller weariness. And with 10 years of highs and lows in the limelight, The Martini Bros. should be worn out.

But they’re not. Momentum isn’t fleeting with youth. Quite the contrary, in fact. This month, the band celebrates a decade of rock and roll memories, both shaken and stirred, with the release of a romping new combination album/DVD aptly titled Decade Deluxe and a host of boisterous release parties to boot.

The new release marks the band’s third full-length overall and first album in almost five years, flaunting seven brand-new tracks, a few previously recorded but unreleased tracks (including the band’s very first recordings), some remastered material from albums passed, as well as all six music videos and a documentary by independent filmmaker Steve Wylam titled “One Night Only.” Decade Deluxe traces the capricious past, explains the bolstered present and foresees the durable future of all things Martini.

“It’s really more ‘future, present, past,’” Gibb smiles wryly from across the table, his thoughts all but tangible. “It’s retrospective, yet still like, ‘Here’s all this new stuff for you too.’”

Throughout the years, with their distinctive hipster looks, unapologetic stage bravado and unveiled rock and roll narcissism, The Martini Bros. have amassed quite a story. And here, in the bar, it becomes clear just how wild a ride it’s been.

On that godforsaken day in the early ’90s when the music industry up and donned itself in tattered flannel, a befuddled Gibb sat hunched over his beat-up hollow-body, scratching the hell out of his thick black pompadour. Doomy Seattle had somehow become a media darling. Neil Young had somehow become a godfather. And America had gone unrepentantly grunge.

“Everybody was just getting heavier and heavier and heavier. It was just so boring to me,” Gibb remembers. “I wanted to go back to roots rock and roll.”

Fascinated by the unpolluted sounds of old-time rock and roll and rockabilly and growing up on a convoluted amalgam of punk and back-alley R&B, Gibb stroked his muse with the stuff of niche classics, instead of getting swept up in a rapid onslaught of ephemeral musical fads.

Gibb and original Martini drummer Chad Matson had just broken up their previous band, Easy Mickey, and recruited Mead, the bassist from Sacred Nation, to form a scaled-down, no-punches-pulled rock and roll outfit.

“We decided we were gonna dress really cool and wear suits,” Gibb recalls of the early days, “be really different and sound different. People loved it immediately because it was rock and roll – and nobody was playing rock and roll anymore.” So the trio thumped and jangled its way throughout the area, churning out old-time bar room stomps one after another, eventually hitting up Philly’s Tongue & Groove Studio to knock down its debut album, Portable, in 1997.

“We wanted to record sounding like they recorded in the ’50s,” Gibb explains, “when people had to be musicians.” Gibb, Mead and Matson packed into a room, ’50s style, and set out to be musicians, boldly recording 12 rockabilly tunes, completely live in just 10 hours. And, with the help of longtime friend and Martini producer Mike Mussmano, the final product was so tight and spotless it garnered the band an instantaneous congregation of devoted fans.

The high of recording success was short-lived, however. Shortly following the release of Portable, The Martinis were rattled by the worst of possible scenarios. Matson, plagued by herniated discs in his back, became addicted to painkillers prescribed to combat the unrelenting pain. Sadly, he passed. And the rumors circulated, becoming more garish with each retelling.

“There used to be, ‘Gibb’s buddy overdosed on heroine,’” Gibb says. “That’s what people wanted to think because it’s such a rock and roll cliché. That was not the case at all.”

Distraught at the death of their friend and unsure of the band’s next move, Gibb and Mead took some time to regroup. “There was one Martini Brother gone,” Gibb laments. “You don’t just go pick up another Martini Brother and keep calling it the same thing.”

Enter Rej Troup. When Gibb and Mead organized a benefit show for Matson’s young daughter following his death, friend and local drum vet Troup filled in on skins, providing a lasting fit.

“There were two people I wanted in the band as a drummer,” Gibb says. “And if I couldn’t have them, then we were gonna go do something else.” The first was gone. Troup was the other. And with his addition, a floundering Martini Bros. snapped back in line.

In 2000, the new lineup headed back to Tongue & Groove to cut a second album, TransMission, thoroughly revamping the in-and-out approach to the previous record. Mussmano and the band spent a year tweaking it into a polished, produced rock and roll record with a hint of – hey, where’d that come from? – pop accessibility. “We wanted to actually produce it more, have an intentional radio hit-sounding song on that record, which was ‘Spinning on an Axis,’” Gibb notes. TransMission brought out the playful side of The Martini Bros. with catchy melody lines, rolling three-part harmonies and lyrics oozing with revelry. And that youthful exuberance carried the band through another few years of gigging, bringing them to the release of a new album this month.

Decade Deluxe holds The Martinis at the top of their game, flaunting a band that hasn’t so much arrived at a linear point of musical conclusion as it’s circled prudently back through its past.

“Each one of our records are so different from one another,” notes Gibb. “We wait so long to put one out that by the time we get our next CD out, we’ve changed a bunch – but we haven’t. It still sounds like The Martini Bros.”

On the new album, the band gives its sound a fresh overhaul. The throwback simplicity of Portable and the cheeky impulse of TransMission have been traded in for – or, more accurately, incorporated into – a more judicious approach to crafting songs. The Martinis have learned to preen their vast array of influences on Decade Deluxe, blurring the authenticity of the old with the timeliness of the new

in an infectious, hell-bent parade of raucous rock anthems.

“You can finally hear the New York City stuff on it, you can hear some of the R&B and hip-hop stuff that I used to listen to, you can hear the punk rock stuff on it, all in the same song,” Gibb observes. “You can finally hear all of our influences.”

So after 10 years of dumping time, money and effort into a band that has major-label potential, but never went for the gusto, how – and more importantly, why – do they keep going?

“We never really set out with this band to go get signed and conquer the universe,” Gibb shrugs. “Sometimes that ruins it, you know? You go get signed and travel around the country in a shitty van with the guys – and you know what? I’m not interested. I really do this to have fun.”

Even without the zeal of deluded star-chasing fantasies, The Martini Bros. continue to keep rock and roll at its most lively. “I think so many people in bands forget so quickly that the reason they got into it was for fun. When rock and roll stops being fun,” Gibb concludes, “you should stop rock and rolling.”