Take the Pixies and give them a whoooole lot of methamphetamine. Put a pre-ambient Brian Eno and a pre-burnout Iggy Pop in a room with the band. Provide one mic for Frank Black and Iggy Pop to fight over. Seal the room off and apply a level of pressure roughly equivalent to that at the bottom of the ocean. Shake vigorously, and Popular Shapes come close to the musical hybrid you'd end up making.

Seattle's Popular Shapes have an offbeat sonic formula for sure, one that frontman Nick Brawley is fully aware of. "The whole point of doing this was just to do something that none of us had ever done before," he says. "We were in a band, kind of garagey punk stuff, and we were playing the music, but we weren't listening to that kind of music anymore--we were listening to things like Wire and the Fall. Everybody just kind of lost interest. I think we're playing stuff that makes more sense for us now."

The influences from the members' garage punk days (Brawley and bassist Lee Reeder are formerly of the River Rats; drummer Kevin Jones and Trent Coahran cut their teeth in Eastern Washington's awesome Ninja Boners) are palpable in their current sound, but the Shapes also employ a more collaborative songwriting style to break outside the standard punk mold in ear-catching, invigorating ways. "We focus less now on making sure we're playing the same chords and more on the way it sounds," says Brawley.

Propelling drums, overdriven guitars, and spastic, exclamatory vocals are all present, but the listener soon gets knocked out of that familiarity by a quirky little changeup in the rhythm. A guitar or bass line shoots off in some psychotic direction that really shouldn't work, but does. Then, suddenly, the backing vocals come in, and one realizes that buried underneath this arrangement lie freakishly mammoth hooks.

Between Seattle's self-importantly "mature" indie artists and self-consciously simple punk rawkers are acts like the Popular Shapes--straddling both paths and combining the expanded expression of age with youth's manic energy.