It's become cool to grouse about the future of rock music. As the mini-masses, pining eternally for the New, get increasingly enthusiastic for more and more out sounds, the anthemic, choked-throat yearning of rock falls behind free jazz, electronic and post-you-name-it sounds. And though it's certainly encouraging that kids are willing to pry their ears wider than folks did in the days when a drum solo was considered avant-garde, it seems a little sad to think that rock and roll-- at its best, arguably the most openly communicative musical art of this century-- will be downsized in the pursuit of increasingly heady abstraction. After all, if teenagers don't listen to pop songs anymore, what are they going to put on mix tapes for crushes? Where will they search for succor in post-breakup Armageddon?

Encouragingly, plenty of bands are taking up the torch and working to fuse emotional directness with intellectual exploration, and the project seems to be coming up roses. Though the recent Superchunk/drum machine/Jim O'Rourke interactions have been, uh, underwhelming, the cross-pollination of these different strands are creating interesting new idioms; sonic freedom has given lyrical themes more room to move, and better backgrounds to evoke their effects.

Enter Shoes and Rider. An arty-looking lot from New York, the band crosses the classic guitar/bass/drums trio with quirky synth lines and a cello that wanders hither and yon over steady, TeenBeat-styled strumming. Vocals so languorous and sweet they come with their own ringer tee whisper humble ponderings of love, ennui and the world we live in. All the while, keyboard twitters and bull fiddle allow for a greater range of expressive possibilities than we, the listening public, are used to in this sort of environment.

Shoes and Rider exploit a number of familiar elements (hi, Tortoise! Hi, Unrest! Hi, Slint!) in the making of their pulsing sounds, but where their influences tended towards straightforwardness-unto-banality or unwarranted eggheadedness, Shoes are able to find a neat and easy balance between the two. The result is a killer late-at-night record, insistent enough to hold your attention but gauzy enough to allow your own philosophical considerations to run free. Though the band does rock occasionally, in a relative sense, it's the drum-and-bass stutterstepping or Aphex Twin-ish effects that keep it from sounding anachronistic or, worse yet, rote.

In fact, Shoes and Rider's more out-there instincts expand the expressive range of the band. The record's epic closer, where guitar, drums and cello perform a gawky chamber-music dance before giving way to mumbled lyrics, is made far larger through its mix of new and old than any single-minded approach might have provided.

The early anxiety about the intrusion of more avant musics into rock's direct attack centered around the idea that, in trying to slough off some of the older music's ideas about form, younger bands would end up learning a new and equally restrictive form. However, as groups like Shoes and Rider mature, it looks like they're not interested in following a newer, cooler set of rules. Instead, they're making up their own as they go along.

-Sam Eccleston