There's a strangely rural thread that winds its way through the entirety of Akron/Family's newest, Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free, seemingly pointing backwards from the band's NYC-bred sound to their roots in the Midwest, and that rustic, Middle America upbringing does indeed shine through at quite a few points on the album, particularly on the Fleet Foxes-esque "Set 'Em Free," the pastoral Cat Stevens-ness of "The Alps & Their Orange Evergreen," and the subtly folky intro section of "They Will Appear," for three. They're more than capable of playing sweet, delicate folk that sounds like it should be ringing (softly, of course) across fields of grain and in between the stands of majestic pine trees.

What Akron/Family really deserve credit for, though, is their ability to graft that rustic/pastoral sound into songs that are most definitely not rustic and/or pastoral, or even folk-y. Try as you might to shove the band into any one prescribed little box, they make their escape, whipping out big, shiny knives to carve their collective way out of the box entirely and leaving weirdly compelling gouges, scrapes, and shadows as evidence.

Take "They Will Appear," again, for an example -- the music begins with low-key drums and spiraling guitar lines, then shifts into a gorgeous chorus of male voices singing to the sunrise (well, that's what it sounds like, at least) before the raggedy, Neil Young-ish guitars come squalling in and the drums drop everybody into a Williamsburg loft for the coolest all-night party you've ever been to. The song crashes and careens, a stomping, confident hippie-church service that lifts its hands up to the skies with a cheery, almost manic smile across its face.

The rest of the disc follows suit, grabbing influences from all corners and dumping them pell-mell into the kitchen sink to brew up a sound that's not really any one thing except maybe psych-rock, and that stretches even the boundaries of that rubbery-edged musical genre. The folk stuff slams head-on into noise-rock guitar ("MBF," which wouldn't sound out of place on a Parts & Labor album) and jubilant, Elephant 6-ish horns ("Gravelly Mountains of the Moon"), pinballs off to morph into a shambling, rambling pseudo-jazz orchestra (the all-left-turns "River"), stops in at the local bar to get down ("Everyone Is Guilty"), and even winds up colliding with a Big Easy-style jazz funeral horn jam (no, really; "Sun Will Shine (Warmth of the Sunship Version)") before melting into a woozy rendition of "Auld Lang Syne."

Through it all, the combinations work nearly flawlessly. The risk of a kitchen-sink effort like this is that by trying to be too many things, a band can end up sounding adrift and unsure, but that's not what's happening here. The trio of Seth Olinsky, Miles Seaton, and Dana Janssen play with big, mischevious grins, mixing and matching like mad scientists and with all the skill that implies. The result is definitely scattered and hard to handle yet absolutely worthwhile, like a less-loopy, more-organic Beta Band with a heavy dose of Sufjan Stevens horns and some Spoon-esque sharp points.

The best track on here, perhaps fittingly, is the first -- "Everyone Is Guilty" immediately kicks all preconceptions in the head and leaves 'em in the gutter to ponder their existence, leaving you to feel your jaw slowly drop as the band cranks into what sounds like some crazed remix of a lost Maceo & the Macks classic. The funky/squishy-sounding keys sound like they fell straight off the soundtrack to Shaft, the percussion's tinkly and busy and yet somehow not irritating, and the gang-shouted verses are nearly impossible to get out of your head, even after one listening.

From there, it's a trippy, swirling spiral down the rabbit hole; you never know where Akron/Family's headed next, but after a track or two, you no longer care about anything beyond hanging on for the ride.

[Akron/Family is playing 2/23/10 at Walter's, along with Warpaint & Buxton.] (Jeremy Hart // 02/23/10)

When I first heard The Eastern Sea, it was in a live setting, with all guns blazing, and the band turned the club into a grinning, sweaty hoedown/tent revival, ending by inviting everybody in the crowd up on the stage to dance and sing. And it was pretty amazing. The recorded experience, however, is a little different -- there's less of the all-out energy, the unabashed joy, evident on the band's two EPs (the self-titled debut and this one here, somewhat unobtrusively titled EP II), which is to be somewhat expected without the live dynamic between the band and their audience.

What you get on EP and EP II, instead, is essentially one intricately-crafted song cycle about love and a girl and, um, I've got no idea what else. It's playful, yet smart as hell, and possibly more deliberate and thought-out than any set of songs I've heard in a long time; listening to tracks like "The Sea" and "Your House," you can't help but believe guitarist/singer/primary songwriter Matthew Hines knew exactly what he wanted these two EPs to sound like and bent the instruments and equipment to his will until it all clicked into place. Everything fits right where it needs to be, from that mournful horn line over there to the half-desperate backing vocals over here; Hines isn't writing songs, he's composing pop symphonies, Brian Wilson-style.

And yes, it's amazing. That's the only word I can come up with that'll encompass the whole thing, and I can't say it enough; I can literally listen to this band play for days on end, in part because my ear'll find some new little piece to focus in on each and every time I listen. Sonically, it's beautifully serene, warm and close-sounding, with the mostly-gentle guitars moving up to stand next to you while they play their part and Hines tells his stories into your ear on the other side. The bass, drums, and assorted other instrumentation meanwhile busies itself in the near distance, always within the room but set somewhat apart.

I'd worried after the debut EP came out, back in 2008, that there'd be no way Hines and company could ever match up to it, but they've blown my fears right out of the water with EP II. They start off with the jaunty, low-slung "The Mountain," a sing-song-y piece of traveling indie-pop that's insistent, sincere, and addictive as hell, and it immediately feels like I just finished listening to EP and have merely moved on to the next song. Hines meanders through the music, coming off like the internal musings of some mostly-contented roadtripper out riding the freeways.

If I hadn't heard second track "The Sea" before, on a split-7" The Eastern Sea did with Houstonian bros News on the March, I'll admit that it might've thrown me off, just because it's so different from anything else I've heard from the band so far. There were bleak, melancholy tracks on EP, to be sure, but none of them approached the level of spooky, unsettling isolation channeled here -- there's some kind of a story being built about a house situated on a constantly-eroding beach, and the music washes appropriately in and out, inexorable as the tide, and as it rolls along it becomes apparent that it's all a mirage, crumbled away when the sun comes up. The narrator (I'm not going to assume it's Hines himself) starts out reveling in the cut-off, out-of-touch nature of the beach life but ends up trapped and alone. Add to that the eerie, Radiohead-esque descending riff the chorus rides, and the end result is a song that's both pretty and sinister at once.

Thankfully, the band lifts the mood somewhat with the cheery, fuzzy-edged "The Name," which reminds me of the best stuff old-school Austin indie-pop guys Silver Scooter ever came up with. It's a toe-tapping, head-nodding joy of a song, one worth hearing on repeat all by itself; I love everything from the overfuzzed guitars and near-shoegazer melody to the cheeky lyrics: "Tell me your name / I swear I'll drop it whenever I can / If you're using mine / I'm pretty sure people know who I am." Closer "Your House" turns things down again and gets more melancholy and somber, with the narrator addressing (presumably) the girl he loves on the eve of her/their departure, although it's never clear whether he's actually saying these things to her or just thinking them and wishing he could speak them aloud.

The song moves along subtly, led by brushed, low-key drums and horns and by Hines' mournful, almost Christopher Cross-ish voice (I know, I know, but I don't mean that in a bad way, just that both voices have this strangely gentle feel to them), as the two people involved make their quiet drive to wherever it is they're going. The track's sweet and poignant, saying just enough to keep you interested but never giving it all away...and then, before you know it, it's over, and you still want more. Put together, the two EPs do indeed complete one another, but hopefully that just means they're one complete beginning for The Eastern Sea, not an ending. If we're lucky, these folks will demolish my expectations yet again.

[The Eastern Sea is playing 2/12/10 at Mango's, along with listenlisten, Peter and the Wolf, & Limb.] (Jeremy Hart // 02/12/10)

Deer Park boys The Gold Sounds know how to start off an album, that's for damn sure. Opener "She Got Me Singin So Low" comes crashing in, so rambunctious and wild you can practically hear singer/bassist Sean Donnelly's knowing smirk right through the speakers, and the track steadily gets more and more chaotic 'til drummer Dee Donnelly is doing a full-on Keith Moon drum blowout at the end and brother Sean and guitarist Chris Fuentes is creating a spiraling squall of guitar sound that all but collapses in on itself. Best. Opening. Track. Ever. (Okay, maybe not Ever, but hey, it's close.)

Admittedly, I'm a bit biased -- after all, Seismic Love is the full-length I've been eagerly awaiting since late in 2007, when I first heard this Deer Park trio's brand of dark, rough-edged, garage-y rock and had to pick my face up off the floor. Since that time, the band's been hard to pin down, only releasing a couple of EP/demos with a shifting set of early-cut songs on 'em; Seismic Love is far, far, far overdue, in my book, and I'm happy as hell to have it here in my hands.

There's a risk, of course, with that kind of anticipation, but The Gold Sounds have delivered, well and truly. They shrewdly kick in the door with the barnburning rockers first, following up "She Got Me Singin So Low" with the slinky snarl of "Champagne," which showcases Sean Donnelly's thick, fuzzed-out, meaty-sounding bass quite nicely and sounds like a song Jack White dearly wishes he'd written, and then with the seriously murky, sinister-sounding "Keep It Rolling," which switches between Ziggy Stardust-ish vocals for the verses and a low-down, almost unbelievably bassy growl for the chorus. Again, Donnelly's bass crunches and rumbles perfectly, sounding like classic Mudhoney but slightly cleaner and more tightly-wound.

The Sounds wisely wait 'til a little ways in to throw the first curve, with the seemingly gentle, sweetly yearning "College Radio"; the song starts of drifting and pretty, but it's all a bait-and-switch for the snapping, propulsive mid-'90s indie-rock that comes in after a minute-and-a-half or so. When it comes to this song, I've found that I honestly don't care how many times I've heard it before. It's just such a smart, wonderfully catchy, well-put-together track that it works every single damn time I put it on. By the time the band gets to the frantic desperation in the line, "My heart starts shaking / and the world starts shaking / and it's all gone," I'm beaming and foot-drumming away like a fool. It's like Superchunk covering the Ramones, in the best fucking possible way.

I should note, by the way, that several of the songs on here -- "Champagne," "College Radio," and "Parfum," for three, at least on the version of the EP I've got -- have popped up on the demo-ish EPs I mentioned earlier, but don't take that to mean any of this is throwaway. Everything but "Parfum" was re-recorded in 2009 for the full-length, and to my ears the previously-released songs sound tighter, more confident, and flat-out better than they did the last time out. (And hey, at this point the odds of digging up one of the early EPs are pretty slim.)

The newer stuff's great, too, mind you. "Too Old To Be Young" may be a bit premature in its self-assessment, if you ask me, but the track's nicely melodic while still having a great, ragged crunch to it that I just can't help but love; both "College Radio" and "Too Old To Be Young" remind me heavily at points of a less-backwoodsy, more Stones-y Kings of Leon, and I don't think that's any kind of bad thing. Then there's "Two Ways," which is remarkably heartfelt and sweet, the tough guys showing their collective heart on their collective sleeve over a rootsy "walking" rhythm and almost Springsteenian melody.

"Rain Machine" brings the dark edge back to the proceedings, placing that awesomely rumbling, fuzzed-yet-tight bass sound right up front and coupling it with Fuentes' twisty, dizziness-inducing riffs to come up with a song that bumps along but sounds genuinely threatening, like a Tarantino-ized take on West Side Story or something. "Parfum" is probably my least-favorite track on here, honestly, with its slow-moving country/blues feel dragging things down a bit, but even that seems to fit better now than it did on the EP.

Plus, it's redeemed by the great, resigned melancholy of "All Love Songs Get Old" and the swaggering stomp of the title track (which makes me think of the Queens of the Stone Age, for some reason). Closer "I See the World Fall" strikes a more poignant note, swooping and meandering along beneath sky-high guitars, and it makes me think (favorably) of Benjamin Wesley more than anything else, both in terms of the melody and vocals.

It's funny, but for a musical genre that holds nonconformity and breaking rules dear, rock & roll as a whole sure seems to have a ton of rules rock bands "have" to follow for things to click. You've got to mean what you're doing -- but not too much; you've got to take risks, to blaze your own trail -- as long as you don't stray too far off the beaten path; you've got have attitude (seriously, how else could you sing about "Seismic Love" and mean it?) -- but not too much. There's a tight, tight target bands like this have to aim for, and you can tell almost immediately when somebody makes a misstep. The Gold Sounds don't just hit the mark, though; they fucking nail it.

[The Gold Sounds are playing their CD release party 2/12/10 at Walter's, along with Paris Falls, T.V. Torso, & The Small Sounds.] (Jeremy Hart // 02/12/10)