THIN WHITE ROPE SPINS KINKY YARNS

Other than its peculiar name, some highly unusual songs with titles like “Dead Grammas on a Train” and “Lithium” and the lead singer’s spooky yelp, Thin White Rope is a pretty conventional rock band.

The Davis-based quartet’s debut LP, “Exploring the Axis” (Frontier Records), is a stunning collection of surreal soundscapes that swing from pulsing, feedback-drenched pieces, to eccentric country tunes, to metal-with-wit rockers.

But that’s only half of it. Over this shifting musical backdrop, singer-songwriter Guy Kyser might warble a complex, bizarro tale about an ax murderer, or maybe suggest that an ancestor’s death might prevent someone’s ideal partner from ever being born. Not the kind of stuff you want on the turntable if you’re in a blue mood.

So it’s surprising to hear Kyser say: “I’ve always been sort of worried that our songs are too conventional. They’ve got a very simple verse-chorus-verse-break-verse kind of structure, so I try to make the parts unusual. But I still don’t feel that (the songs) come out as anything unique.”

During an interview backstage at the Music Machine after a recent performance there (the band returns for a show Saturday at Raji’s), Kyser explained that the record’s sweeping stylistic terrain is a result of the songs having been written during various time periods.

“They’re phases,” he said. “One of the things I worried about for the album was how to incorporate all these phases into one big thing that makes sense. The phases are three to six months at a time--a metal-riff phase with a lead thing on it, a country phase when the band broke up for a summer and I just played acoustic guitar. . . . “

(The group has undergone a few personnel changes since the first Thin White Rope incarnation in 1982. The current lineup is Kyser, drummer Jozef Becker, bassist Stephen Tesluk and guitarist Roger Kunkel.)

“ ‘Atomic Imagery’ is probably most similar to what we’re heading into right now,” Kyser continued, “but it will be a lot heavier on the guitar . . . distortion throughout, with repeating, melodic hooks on the guitar. They’re riff songs, basically.”

Apparently as prolific as he is quirky, Kyser has already written a number of these “riff songs,” plus a batch of tunes that aren’t likely to get the Rope treatment. “We all work, so we don’t have time to practice enough to learn some of the things I write,” he said.

Despite this stockpile of unused material, the 24-year-old Kyser isn’t interested in pursuing a solo project on the side. However, he said that he’d “love to have enough time to have a part-time straight country band. . . . And I’d like to have a part-time straight heavy-metal band.”

Thin White Rope will continue to plug away in the quiet college town of Davis (home of such other first-rate bands as Game Theory and the now-defunct True West) before embarking on a U.S. tour with Frontier labelmates Naked Prey and the Pontiac Brothers. Sometime after that--probably in July, Kyser guesses--the band will return to the studio to record the follow-up to “Axis.”

After assessing the group’s current modus operandi and its plans for the future, Kyser, in a characteristic moment of understatement, pointed out: “We’re trying to make a transition from being semi-semiprofessional to semiprofessional.”