(Capitol)
By Sean Moeller

Five Texas scientists go into a room called Big Orange and emerge months later with results that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we’re short-changing ourselves, we’re self-destructive and we don’t know a good thing if it takes out an eye or buzzes off one or both of our ears. It sounds like a story that could be told with those of splitting the atom, plutonium, birds with no beaks and the Trinity Site in New Mexico. But the Texas five in the band Sound Team are just as experimental and dead-serious about their work as Robert Oppenheimer was about his, though these boys are not secretly dreading the deadly power and evil they’re introducing into the world and maybe into the wrong hands. As their debut full-length is a testament to, Sound Team – through scientific interpretation, shimmying into hidden melodic tombs that one couldn’t have imagined existed from the outside looking in and a fierce wonder about what was possible out of their throats and instruments—came out of their lab as alchemists.

The album, which follows the release of last year’s “Work” EP, a teaser that contained the agitated, burning opener “The Fastest Man Alive” and alluded to more being in the cards, flies through aberrations of style and makes everything that occurs within it desperately important. Only “TV Torso” – a lengthy, unmoving, dancey something that The Faint would have turned its back on like an ugly child – fails to deliver a tooth-cracking knockout, working a so-what groove that doesn’t stack up to all of the other party favors and dreamy adventure on the record. And that’s not necessarily saying that the song is a flat tire (it’s actually more of a stunner with every listen), but it comes at an odd time in the album when things are going in a different direction. “No More Birthdays” – the single that should and will make them blogger pin-ups – had just slammed itself against rocks and shore like an angry ocean with a toothache, thrilling with the chorus, “Let’s s peed it up so we can slow back down/Kafka on the shore/Ah, Kafka on the shore/Rising up for rising down/You’re speeding up to slow back down/Oh Kafka on the shore.” You’ll find yourself singing about Kafka in the oddest of places. The gas station at the dinner table – those close to you will suspect you’ve become unstable and unhealthily consumed by the German novelist. Then the title track – a ballad of sorts – moves through with a vaguely sinister agenda. It’s a meditation about presumed fears that Matt Oliver sings without haste. It operates like a tale of foreboding, like a tale of conniving/produced fear. We don’t know that the monster’s mechanical and they don’t want us to know. We have to think Jaws is real, I guess. It’s more frightening that way.

Oliver sings like the hard night’s gotten to him in the same raspy way that The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser and even Rod Stewart do. Oft compared to The Walkmen, Sound Team are entrepreneurs compared to the New York group (though the band’s “A Hundred Miles Off” is one of the year’s coolest records of 2006 thus far), climbing into different bodies and different roles with every song, making it impossible to clarify any firm intentions. Where the Walkmen have gravitated to consistency, Sound Team explores what it means to be considered a band on “Movie Monster.” This is not complacent songwriting, but the writing of hungry men.