WATER SPHERE

Pilotdrift

From Gibby Haynes to the Polyphonic Spree to Roky Erickson, Texas has long been a fertile breeding ground for pop music eccentrics. Even seasoned Lone Star State observers might be surprised by Texarkana's Pilotdrift, though, whose second disc, "Water Sphere," warbles and wiggles through a pop music dreamscape that is positively otherworldly.

The quintet is the first act inked to Good Records (an offshoot of the Dallas record store owned by the Spree's Tim DeLaughter and Julie Doyle) that doesn't feature DeLaughter as a member. Pilotdrift shares the Spree's widescreen dynamics but little else: The centerpieces of "Water Sphere," "Late Night in a Wax Museum" and the nearly 10-minute "Jekyll and Hyde Suite," drag sci-fi psychedelia into a dank and bubbling mad-scientist lab and perform countless crossbreeding experiments on it. The opening "Caught in My Trap" is spooky, too, immediately evoking Danny Elfman's inspired singing and score for Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas," as does the pulsating "Elephant Island" before it boogies into the mist on electric guitar and organ that sounds like circa-'76 Kansas.

Swathed in lush strings and sharpened by guitar runs, "Water Sphere's" verdant sound occasionally parallels the work of Mercury Rev but is underpinned by a swatch of Texas weirdness that makes it both fascinating and a little unsettling. And if the arrangements are occasionally bloated -- suggesting Pilotdrift could one day turn into this decade's Marillion -- the majority of "Water Sphere's" monster mashes sound great, a salve for ears rubbed raw by current pop's redundancy.

-- Patrick Foster