Arty Alt-Rock With a Too-Constant Hum

Offbeat but not off the beaten path, Dynamo Hum plays a dissonant, abstract, but not completely pop-averse form of arty alterna-rock rooted firmly in the mid-’80s innovations of Sonic Youth and Throwing Muses.

The rhythms are spare, spiny, compulsive--a Muses trademark. The song structures are episodic, alternating between unsettling soft passages and driving alarm. Along the way, Dynamo Hum usually manages a vocal hook on which to hang a song.

Guitarists Michael Grodsky and Scott Zeidel try for an avant-gardist approach that juxtaposes tense, clanging riffs with eerie, needling lead-guitar parts. What emerges sounds like a less dense and power-packed Sonic Youth. Singer Jennifer Hung delivers oblique interior monologues--troubled scrawls from a diary whose purpose is to lacerate foes and self alike, and to register the chilly, clipped breath of nightmarish fright.

Her style immediately brings the Muses’ Kristin Hersh and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon to mind. Even the album graphics are cribbed from the highly stylized look of records on the British 4AD label--including early releases by Throwing Muses and the Pixies.

“Fallopian” is much more cohesive than Dynamo Hum’s debut CD from 1995, when Hung, then a recent addition, hadn’t fully blended into the otherwise all-male band. Here she sounds confident, and sometimes commanding, fronting 10 of the 11 songs instead of being used as a second-chair singer.

Ultimately, the CD is too cohesive: After a promising start, it lapses into sameness, relieved only by “In My Backyard,” an ironic, Calypso-tinged suburban pastoral that serves as a nice change of pace, bringing a touch of whimsical humor to an otherwise baleful and dour collection.

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If Dynamo Hum were working back in the vinyl LP age, when its chief influences first made their marks, “Fallopian” would have been the sort of record you’d play through once or twice, then stick to Side One for the good stuff. That’s where the outstanding track, “There Once Was a Girl Named Fallopian,” resides. It’s the album’s most driving and haunting song, with a sour limerick refrain offsetting more descriptive images of a woman in the throes of violent mental illness. Hung fills it with icy dread that cuts through her character’s attempted veneer of cool detachment. This sort of thing has been done very well before by Gordon, but Hung has a knack for it too.

(Available from Dynamo Hum, P.O. Box 9253, Calabasas, CA 91372-8253, or https://www.dynamohum.com.)

* Dynamo Hum, Torie Tyson, Grassroots Fallout, 1440 and Middle Earth play Saturday at Hogue Barmichael’s, 3950 Campus Drive, Newport Beach. 8 p.m. (Dynamo Hum plays at 10:30). $5. (949) 261-6270.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four stars (excellent).