This past weekend I plopped down $50 bucks for two albums, Some Girls and Hot Rocks 1964-1971. These two albums are the first steps in what I hope will become an extensive collection of Rolling Stones stuff. No, not the shitty corporate-fueled music magazine (which my close friends creatively refer to as The Ass Rag), but the old-school, ass-kicking, groupie-fucking, drug-taking, all around pioneering rock and roll band. That's right, after a record-shattering career one-and-a-half times longer than my lifespan, the Stones have just recently won me over as a fan.

The Stones' appeal is simple and eternal; they play rock music, and that's it. They summed it up best themselves with the infamous line, "It's only rock and roll, but I like it." You don't get more cheerfully Cro-Magnon than that. It's about making some money getting some tail, and jamming in your best "rock out with your cock out" pose.

It was while I was immersed in the furry-knuckled, feces-flinging, fire-fearing, Rolling Stones-listening mindset that I listened to the Glands' self-titled release from Capricorn Records. And it was no easy transition, let me tell you. There might be some surface stylistic similarities between the two, but the distance between the Stones, the grandfathers of the misbehaving rock star, and the Glands, some of the geekiest boys you'll find this side of a role-playing game, could conveniently be measured in light-years. Meek boys don't make badass rock stars, and the Glands is as anti-rock an album as I've heard in a while. In short, it's really good, in a brainy kind of way.

Mixing more styles than a Duckbill Platypus mixes species, the Glands have produced an album of intelligent, satisfying and impossible to categorize music. Although some will write the album off as nothing more than pop-savvy indie rock, there's simply too much going on here to call it "indie" and leave it at that. The album is 85% college radio staple, but bold sweeps of jazz, country, soul and funk influence flesh out what could have been another nameless rock record, and make it something worth listening to.

The album's opener, "Burn Was Easy," is an honorable addition to lazy groove tracks everywhere. Handing out liberal doses of sleepy, white-boy funk with out-of-tune guitars and even more tuneless vocals, the Glands are as goofy-- and almost as inspired-- as Pavement in their heyday. But not content to merely revive the dying genre of white soul, the band switches to ragtime jazz three songs later, with the jangly, but subtly sad, "Swim." "I Can See My House from Here," plays with jazz pianos, dance beats and soul music grooves, creating a whimsical piece that sounds like silly ass suburban kids taking a stab at hip-hop.

The Glands' true talent is turning their genre experiments into honest, and honestly entertaining, music. Rather than merely fucking around with this diverse range of musical styles, the Glands seem sincere in actually trying to write good rap, funk, and country songs, and that earnestness sells the music when the band's slightly limited innovation might not.

Flying closer to traditional rock territory are songs like "Fortress," a track so deep-fried in southern rock guitar you can smell the cholesterol. "Straight Down" is pure indie-rock, circa 1984, and sounds like some beautiful relic left over from an early Dinosaur studio session. But if you're confused by all this variety, you shouldn't be. The band brings it all together into one seamless whole, which says a lot for their skill.

Still, the album sports a couple of throwaway numbers. Ironically, "Work It Out," the song that tries the hardest to be straightforward, ends up the being the least engaging song on the album. Another straight-up rock song, "Ground," is dark, 60's psych-rock from start to finish, complete with a jazzy Doors-ish organ solo near the end. While these tracks may be well executed and clever, they simply don't stand out as anything special in the Glands' eclectic bag of tricks.

The main complaint I have about straight rock music is that it so rarely cares. If it doesn't wear a mini-skirt or have an "80 proof" label on its side, rock music could give a shit about it. And as fun as that can be for brief periods, sometimes you want more than cheap thrills.

Whereas Mick Jagger and Keith Richards may be the cool, pill-popping music gods we wish we were, the Glands are the music-loving nerds we know we are. Lucky for us, those nerds also happen to be some talented bastards, and they're writing songs. Good songs. For us.

-Steven Byrd