The underground has always had a contentious relationship with the idea of rocking. Your typical underground hero avoids it studiously (i.e. Pavement, Sebadoh, your personal favorite in-joke superstar), and those adventurous enough only do it with mighty large quote marks around the whole affair. The notion smacks of machismo, braggadocio and all the other things so heavily associated with rock and roll as a mainstream idiom; the natural reaction for any counter-culturalist is to duck the prospect as much as possible.

Sixto, which features the unlikely combination of former members of Seam and dis-, seem to be trying to split the difference. From Seam, they've borrowed dry-as-a-bone songwriting and arrangement ethic, while trying to spice things up with the noise and troublemaking that dis- made their name with. And when you name songs things like "When Ozzy Was Subversive," you know the question of whether to really rock or not is going to come up plenty on its own.

Despite the disparate histories of the band members here, there's surprisingly little conflict between their two sounds, and in the end, it all comes off a bit like competent math-rock covers of unrecorded Seam songs. Each song plods along steadily with a modicum of distortion and menace, but, instead of Seam's tortoise-and-the-hare philosophy, they've gussied everything up with a dash more complexity: songs feature more varied parts and rely more heavily on polyrhythms. But, in the end, there's neither an attempt to make a Seam-y noise record, nor a distinctly poppy math-rock album. Instead, the result here is some pleasant, if largely undiverting rock music, circa Chicago, 1995. The album slides along pleasantly enough, without ever slipping entirely into the background. Unfortunately, it never insists on the listener's attention, either.

In the end, Sixto's ultimate problem is that it's hard to make someone care about a record they've probably heard a million times before under other names. Everything here is in the right place, but without a shock of wit, originality or real passion, it just becomes a fairly dull case of déjà vu. Sixto sound like they're playing in a band because it's as good a way to kill time as any. Sadly, the same thing can't be said for the resultant record.

-Sam Eccleston