Viewers following the fifth season of The Sopranos may have been seduced already by the edgy psychedelia of Low Flying Owls. Apparently someone at HBO thought that some stylized retro-rock would be the perfect musical accompaniment to the whacking, bosom-watching, psychoanalysis, garbage removal and other stuff that those meaty Jersey mobsters do with their free time, so the band's "Glad to Be Alive" plays in this season's second episode. Even if you're not a TV junkie or an "independent businessman" in the plumbing-supply industry, you'll probably recognize something fuzzy and familiar in the Owl's meanderings. Musically, the group cribs its sounds from a range of adventurers old and new -- the noodlings of Pink Floyd, the spacescapes of Spiritualized, the groovy ambience of Grandaddy, the bubblegum distortion of the Jesus and Mary Chain, the acid-rock epics of Neil Young -- sometimes all in the same song. But even if the band sometimes swoops a bit predictably around the sonic landscape, one rarely gets tired of trying to follow its movements.
