Everybody needs an anthem, something to which you can pump your fist and shout. Something that makes you jump up and down, want to start a band, and scream at the top of your lungs. Something so mindlessly glorious that you can't help but think how kind and benign the world is because it's capable of producing such a work. A three-minute blurt of simple-minded, uni-directional rock-and-roll flameout. Happily, such an anthem doesn't have to remain constant. Your anthem of choice can change from moment to moment, year to year, mood to mood.

For the moment, "Patty," from Hello, seems like a perfectly serviceable personal anthem. A heartfelt, plainspoken song about overwrought, decent, all-American lust for a person with the titular name, "Patty" overflows with riffs, keyboard twiddles and frantic, propulsive rhythms. It's direct, silly and noisy enough to ring from sea to shining sea as a pounding rock track utterly worthy of anthemhood.

Even better, Half Japanese aren't really the sort of band inclined to produce anthems in the first place. A rotating lineup of sidemen backing Jad and David Fair, these guys have been around for decades, authoring affable little garage-rock haiku. On the band's early records, much of this work was composed of twiddling guitars and Jad's nasal talk-sing. Most songs finished in little more than a minute, sounded largely improvised, and involved Frankenstein as a lyrical leitmotif. Virtually every song served as a poignant metaphor for personal and social disaffection, as Jad's narrators struggled against cowboys, monsters and his own crippling shyness. And in most of these pitched battles, he found himself on the losing side.

Frankenstein's still around, happily, but Hello distinctly falls into the more recent, relatively relaxed region of Half Japanese's discography. Backed by an able rhythm section, Jad goes it alone this time, pounding out developed, somewhat nuanced rock songs that never give up his musical adolescence's charming naïveté and idiosyncrasy. Though the opener, "All the Angels Said Go to Her," musters an almost-soulful groove, it still nicely complements Jad's loopy lyrical vision and the inimitable whine of his vocals. Not unlike something from his collaboration with Yo La Tengo, where he pieced together spoken-word narratives out of tabloid headlines, Fair sounds less agitated and better adjusted than on past works, instead writing (gasp!) an anxiety-free love song.

For a great one-two punch, the band follows the track with the awesome, aforementioned "Patty," which continues the party in fine form. And "Temptation" seals the deal with a discordant scrawl reminiscent of Japanese discs past. In fact, most of Hello's length is composed of such pleasures-- wall-to-wall guitar fuzz backing up Fair's endearing little rambles.

Anyone following Half Japanese's albums over their long stay in the rock arena has to enjoy the project's increasing comfortableness with complexity and craft. Hello demonstrates this sophistication to terrific effect, letting Jad's charming quirks take flight with more complex backgrounds. It's the sort of development that deserves its own anthem. Good thing the boys were smart enough to write one.

-Sam Eccleston