The power trio of singer-guitarist Kevin MacDonald, bassist Eric Watts and drummer Tom Bishop make the most of their instrumentation with inventive rhythms that feature tight twists and turns. Bordering on the progressive, MacDonald and friends bend the rules of what a power trio should sound like. Theirs is liberating and imaginative and pushes the envelope to new heights. This is thinking man’s music and will be appreciated those who are looking for something of outside the norm.

Check out the radio friendly ‘Empty As A Promise’ or the manic ‘Beat The Clock’ and see if you don’t agree.

He's got a groovy thing going, baby...the first two songs would make a great single in the mold of Baby Ray, whom he’s most likely a big fan of – not that there’s anything wrong with that! His voice is air worthy (maybe even sponge-worthy) in an Elvis Costello sort of way. The third song, "Happy," alack, doesn’t float our boat at all – it’s too long and under-dynamic. The A-side, "What’s Today" is charming in its adolescent-oid isolationism as well as in its somewhat naive and yet slightly sinister and suicidal way – it’s rife with irony you could cut with a knife – and is that a riff from (the strangely newly popular) "Baba O’Reilly" lurking in the arras? Musically, the song is brilliant – the bouncy rhythmic and percussive line is ably complemented by the painfully jaunty vocals. The follow up, "Hide Your Head," has a fine bass bottom and a wonderfully hook-rich rhythmic guitar line which can’t help but evoke our interest, and the song’s overall structure is complex and interesting. We’re inspired. We were also thinking about how much we like XTC’s epics "Jason and the Argonauts" and "Travels in Nihilon," and about how these tunes are pretty much cast from the same sort of mold. It’s almost impossible to choose, but "Hide Your Head," with its ascending harmonies in the vocals, gets my pick for Song of the Month, with "What’s Today" a very close second. Call (617) 381-6995. Visit: www.kevinmacdonaldband.com.

The uncannily elastic and yet also synthetic rigor of "Beat the Clock" doesn't put the 1980 Disco number of the same name by (of all people) Sparks out to pasture - interestingly enough, it utilizes the same device of creative percussion to signify temporality. (For that matter, The Hollies did the same thing back in 1967 with their maddening, import-only album track "Water on the Brain.") "Time Enough" treads similar ground. The definite keeper here is the ambitious "Supergenius," which we suspect may be something of a Baby Ray homage of sorts. It's a meandering tune full of twists and turns that keeps us listening in spite of its unnaturally distended length. We might mention that for all the bounciness of the tunesmithing represented here, there's also an air of ambiguous resignation underlying these toe-tappers, which allows the songs to shade into art territory rather than encouraging us to regard them as mere entertainment fodder. "Supergenius" is my pick for Song of t he Month for November. FOUR 1/2 STARS