Three-for-All

The audience isn't here for a rare Kraftwerk bootleg sale or to ask employees what Prince is really like when he's buying giant posters of himself. They're here for Ad Astra Per Aspera, and that makes the band members a little uneasy. They titter nervously and stare at the floor while tuning their instruments, which have somehow been shoehorned into a claustrophobic patch of space in the back of the store.

Five people, three guitars, three keyboards, a drum kit and assorted noisemakers are wedged between stacks of posters. This performance celebrates the release of the band's EP, Cubic Zirconia. As fate would have it, the finished album was flown in that morning, albeit too late for the previous night's show.

"It was a total Spinal Tap moment," lead singer and guitarist Mike Tuley tells the crowd with a laugh. "We had a CD-release party with no CDs."

Not that convention is a high priority for Ad Astra Per Aspera. The band begins its Recycled set with soft atmospherics, Tuley playing his guitar with a violin bow, Julie Noyce massaging the keyboard, both singing in a whisper. Drummer Kurt Lane delivers staggered pa-rum-pum-pum-pums, Scott Edwards plunks a bass line, and Brooke Hunt fiddles with the sampler.

Then all hell breaks loose.

Noyce is pounding on the keyboard. Tuley is screaming into the belly of his guitar. Lane fires Uzi drumroll bursts. The music builds feverishly, then abruptly drops off a cliff into placid waters. It is loud. Then quiet. Then loud again. Some beeps and whistles, scrapes and twangs, a chime -- did I just hear a baby rattle? -- and some screams, and plenty of guitar squall. It's a subtly organized and wonderfully chaotic mess.

"We're going to be at the Westport Coffee House on the 15th," Tuley says casually after ripping through an abbreviated set. "Unless you're going to prom. Then we're the official prom afterparty."

He's only half-joking. The band's experimental punk does draw a broad spectrum of indie aficionados.

"There's a pretty strange mixture of people at our shows," Lane says. "But people seem to like what we're doing fine. They seem able to overcome the fact that our songs are a lot of disparate parts."

Indeed, a lot can happen during an Ad Astra song. Bells. Whistles. Rattles. Drums. Guitars. Keyboards. Sir Ian McKellen reading a riding-lawnmower service manual. OK, not the last one. But Cubic Zirconia does manage to sprawl across musical borders. And the songs are complex for a reason. The band pieces them together with the painstaking diligence of a cut-and-paste ransom letter. The band has completed little more than ten songs in two years as a result, although Lane assures that the band is just starting to find its stride.

"Some of the first songs we did were pretty all over the place," Lane says. "It would take us a long time to put something together. Now, I think it's a lot more focused. We all have a more solid idea of what we want to do."

It's 1 o'clock on Sunday morning, and the spotlight is shining in the eye of the Hurricane. It's that time of night when everything blurs into one big Picasso, when you hardly notice a man in a green M&M suit gyrating to "Shake Ya Tailfeather" on the Hurricane's outdoor stage. Melts in your mouth? Good lord, we hope not.

Inside, things are less surreal but just as riotous. The sweltering club is full of scenesters wearing each other's T-shirts and singing each other's songs. These are the ardent local music supporters who play together, stay together, and whose bands will die ignominiously together.

Then there are the guys in the Sound and the Fury -- veterans reviled as much as they are revered within the music community. But this is their night. A celebration of the new Another Stage. And this band can reach that elusive other stage. They know they can. They've done the time. Done the work. Their sound is "infectious," which means catchy music that's almost too accessible for the discerning critic.

The band drew some 600 people to a hometown show in Pittsburg, Kansas, the night before. After the band launches into "Millionaire Losers," it's no mystery why. The song is made for rock radio. Air-guitar riffs. Shout-along chorus. The crowd is infected.

Lead singer Jeff Wood exhorts them with "everybody" proclamations ("I want to see everybody sing along!") before the band finishes with crowd-pleasing covers of Tool's "Aenema" and the Beatles' "Hey Jude."

The latter selection might seem curious for a band called the Sound and the Fury, whose members look like they spend far more time at Gold's Gym defining their deltoids than at Barnes & Noble leafing through Faulkner. But Wood wears his heart on his bulging sleeve. This isn't Elliott Smith rip-your-heart-out-with-a-spatula-and-stab-it-to-your-arm-with-a-rusty-nail, but it is emotional and it is rock. Not unlike the fare of maligned native son Wes Scantlin.