BUZZ BANDS

Around the next indie bend

Credit the Mae Shi for being as scrappy as its music -- noisy, boundary-pushing agit-rock framed in songs that flash by like images from a broken film projector. A week before the L.A. quintet’s current 41-show, 41-day tour began, bassist Tim Byron’s car was burglarized. Stolen: $1,300 worth of CDs the Mae Shi planned to sell as merchandise, the lifeblood of a touring indie band.

“I’d love to go to some swap meet in Pico-Union and see them being sold for two bucks,” Byron says by phone from Middlebury, Vt. “But I don’t think there’s much of a black market for Mae Shi CDs.”

The tour was launched amid some compassion and resourcefulness. Fans donated some money; the albums’ distributor replenished some

of what was lost by dis-

counting copies of the (33-songs-in-43-minutes) album “Terrorbird” and the (10-songs-in-15-minutes) EP “Heartbeeps.”

“And we just dumped everything we were working on onto CD-Rs,” Byron says. “Bands like us make more money from merch than we do from the door at most shows.”

Because of the challenging nature of their music, Byron

and bandmates Brad Breeck, Ezra Buchla, Corey Fogel and Jeff Byron never know what awaits. “We’ll play to five people in Oklahoma City, then get

150 for a show in Little Rock, Ark.,” he says. “We know we’re never gonna be No. 1 with a bullet or anything; it’s a slow process.”

Grabbing time

in the limelight

Even as she plays out the dream “of being in the rock band I’ve wanted to be in since I was 13,” Eleni Mandell can’t hide. On “Sex, Fashion, and Money,” the album coming out next week from her side project the Grabs, Mandell is wry and occasionally shadowy, if more playful than on her five stylistically varied solo albums.

“I just wanted to have some fun, dance around and be lighthearted,” says Mandell, who is joined by bassist Nigel Harrison (Blondie), guitarist Steve Gregoropolous (Lavender Diamond, W.A.C.O.) and drummer Elvira Gonzalez (ex-Silversun Pickups). “This is me, seeing the bright side.”

Five of the songs were co-written with Gregoropolous -- Mandell’s first try at creative collaboration. “I always thought that writing with somebody would be embarrassing,” she says. “But co-writing with my friend Steve was very therapeutic.”

The quartet performs Tuesday at Spaceland.

Fast

forward

Animal Liberation Orchestra, whose funky, feel-good grooves have won the L.A.

quartet fans on the jam-band scene, performs at this month’s installment of the film-discussion-music party First Fridays at the Natural History

Museum.... Rock quartet Building a Better Spaceship is the local entry in the U.S. final

of the 2005 Global Battle of the Bands. The group will face off against 11 other acts on Friday at the Key Club.... And the early show Sunday at Spaceland features pop scene favorites Candypants and Kristian Hoffman leading into a double-

barreled album-release show for Listing Ship’s “Time to Dream” (a collection of dreamy, if charmingly bent, chamber pop) and Carolyn Edwards’ self-titled

debut of heady piano-based

pop.

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Kevin Bronson

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Recommended downloads

* Stream “Vampire Beats” by choosing the Mae Shi from the “Bands” menu at www.5rc.com.

* Stream “Already Forgotten”: www.thegrabs.com.

* Stream Listing Ship’s “Chinese Song”: trueclassicalcds.com/listingship.

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-- Kevin Bronson