If you're going to be fucked up, it pays to be subtle. If a guy walks up to you on the street and announces, "Hey! I'm all fucked up! Whooooo!" it's probably not going to be too frightening. You may offer him a few bucks or a sandwich, but it's not because you're intimidated; it's because the act of directly announcing one's own weirdness is so sad, it makes it pretty difficult to take anything the announcer says as serious or threatening.

Yes, indeed, it's the barely detectable traces of insanity that truly resonate. If a seemingly likeable guy starts chatting you up on the street, but twitches uncontrollably every time you say a word that starts with the letter "e," it can get a little freaky. It's that element of a potentially dangerous disorder lurking just beneath the surface that makes things really interesting, if not particularly appealing.

The Better Button is a pretty damned appealing album. Though the production is lo-fi and at times abrasive, the songs are catchy and cool enough, in a Bee Thousand-era Guided by Voices kinda way, that you just can't help but love them. Take the album's opening track, "I Sell Love," a fuzzy pop/rock ditty with enough melody to keep you satisfied and enough chord and dynamics changes to keep you interested, not to mention a charming, hamony-filled chorus. The slightly country-inflected "Watch Yourself" rides along on plucked acoustic and distorted slide guitars-- not as attention-grabbing as other parts of the record, but nonetheless memorable and well-executed.

Elsewhere on the album, we have the bouncy "Blue and Crème Car," a song that sounds a bit like "Watch Yourself," but more direct and grandiose, with a dreamy bridge and some chugging tambourines. "Peep Show" begins as a lullaby of sorts, with a lovely, if predictable melody, until some hyper-fuzzy guitars blow the song to bits, and the tempo practically doubles. So it's all good. We've got melody, we've got structure, we've got fuzz. Thus, we've got a great album. End of story.

Or maybe not. Sure, much of The Better Button consists of great fuzzed-out rock songs, but that's far from the whole picture. As the song titles suggest, The Better Button is filled with little hints of utter weirdness, bordering on deviance-- tiny fucked-up Easter eggs of sorts that make the album stand out from the unimaginative crowd.

Perhaps the band's greatest asset is that all four members sound just a little bit... off. This shines through particularly well because each member contributes to the songwriting process, and all four sing at some point on the record. Given the fact that four different but similarly strange individuals crafted this record, there are very few moments when The Better Button sounds "right." "I Sell Love" may be a catchy-as-fuck rock song, but Tim Feleppa's voice seems odd in a way that's hard to describe, but is in some ways comparable to the way Dean and Gene sound on early Ween records.

And speaking of which, Ween is actually not a bad point of reference for this record. "Think of Me" could easily be a Ween outtake, with over-enunciated vocals and lyrics like, "Fat man comes for a taste," and, "I remember your kiss/ And the fear in your fist/ Do you remember my face?/ It's the one that you hit." But the Mink Lungs seem somehow more vital and dangerous than the brothers Ween; this isn't comedy or parody or by any stretch of the imagination. Which is not to say it isn't clever-- "Snail" features semi-comedic in-jokes like "We know/ Who's at our shows/ All our friends/ And a coupla musicians." Like many other songs on The Better Button, "Snail" is accentuated by bits and pieces of cut-up sound, fleshing out the song and bringing it to life.

As is often the case, though, weirdness has a tendency to drift into aimlessness. The Better Button isn't without its failed forays into hyperactive punk rock and unlistenable noise. When the Mink Lungs try too hard at weirdness and general outlandishness, it's easy to lose interest. When, on the other hand, they let their strangeness bubble under the surface of some excellent rock music, it's hard to know whether to smile or to raise your eyebrows in an expression of vague disapproval. Me, I'm doing both. And I'm enjoying it.

-Matt LeMay