BUZZ BANDS

The Start won’t stop

Its album of punked-out new-wave music is titled “Initiation,” but the Start (or, as the quartet likes to render it, theSTART) could have called its new record “Hazing.” “What we’ve gone through,” vocalist Aimee Echo says, “was an initiation, a rite of passage.”

What the band endured were emotional oscillations meted out by “this really fickle business,” Echo says. The euphoria of hooking up with a powerful label in 1999 turned to frustration when the debut album “Shakedown!” was shelved. Not long after its release in 2001 -- and with the new wave of new wavers still a couple of years away -- the Start’s backers cut them loose. Echo and guitarist-keyboardist Jamie Miller remade the band, and now they call Huntington Beach-based Nitro Records home. “We’ve been so steadfast,” Echo says. “You could say we’ve been successful in not failing.”

With Echo’s yowls recalling equal parts Siouxie Sioux and Gwen Stefani, “Initiation” (released Aug. 24) at once channels torment and announces rebirth. “This is the first time again,” she sings in the title track -- not that things figure to get easier. The lineup, which includes Erick Sanger on bass, recently changed again with the departure of drummer Billy Brimblecom Jr. So the Start will start its tour Sunday at Chain Reaction with No Doubt’s Adrian Young filling in.

Starlite expression

Dante Adrian sure can belt it out -- but his vocals are not the yelping-passed-off-as-angst you hear from young metal bands. No, Adrian’s is good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll caterwauling, every bit the necessity to cut through the Starlite Desperation’s thicket of fuzzed-out guitars and clattering percussion. It’s a sound called “smog-psych” -- think of it as sprawling garage rock on hallucinogens.

That calamitousness has translated to a steady buzz on tour, where the band has spent most of the time since the May release of its EP “Violate a Sundae.”

“I always wondered how I would like constant touring,” says Adrian, whose band, with the current lineup of Jeff Ehrenberg (drums), Dana Lacono (bass) and Ernest Gibson (guitar), plays tonight at the Knitting Factory, the fifth in a 33-date tour. “Most of us really enjoy it -- it always fosters fantasies of self-improvement when I get back.”

But it doesn’t lend itself to album making, so the band’s full-length debut for Capitol will probably emerge next year, and Adrian allows that “some of it will be creepier” than “Violate a Sundae.” Creepier? Says Gibson: “Because of the various spectral presences that follow each of us around.”

Fast

forward

Released last week, the two-disc “Take Action! Vol. 4” from Sub City is the label’s best compilation -- imagine Now It’s Overhead and Pedro the Lion in the same package as Shadows Fall and Terror.... Year Future, with a new EP “The Hidden Hand” just out, plays the Echo tonight.... Impressive Norwegian punks Surferosa visit the Viper Room on Tuesday.