thedailytimes.com : Your 24/7 news source

A funny thing happened when the members of Austin, Texas-based chamber/noise rock outfit Cue sat down to start work on “Wedding Song,” the band’s most recent album.

The darkness that was present on “Bring Back My Love,” the band’s 2005 debut, just wasn’t there. Sure, there’s something brooding to the instrumental music made by Cue; but on “Wedding Song,” the band veers into more upbeat territory that caught the members by surprise.

“For ‘Bring Back,’ we wrote all of the songs within the first year of playing together, and it was really kind of dark, melodramatic stuff,” Cue violinist Stacy Meshbane told The Daily Times this week. “Then when we started writing on the next one, we tried to do that again, and we just couldn’t really find anything that worked like that. Maybe we just got happier, although I don’t remember being that miserable or anything.

“But this one ended up being really poppy and dance-ish, and I think it just sounds happier.”

Indeed, from the outset — well, after the short and brooding intro “Every Wing Hits at Once,” which is an excellent pump-fake for what follows — the band seems intent on lifting the spirit. “Wedding Song for Living Things and Dead Things” has a distinctive Celtic feel to it, anchored by light bass lines and a delicate interplay between violin and guitar. “Can You See My Skeleton?” kicks off with some frenetic drumming, slowly bringing the remaining instruments into the mix until the end result is a high-energy free-for-all that stretches on for more than 7 minutes; and “Fleur De Lis” anchors the album’s end with a joyous intermingling of anthemic guitar and gentle piano. The entire album is a glimpse of sun after a stormy day — the brightness of white light on wet pavement, the warmth of the sun on the cheeks, the receding clouds as the sky grows its blue beard back to full.

And it’s all done without the benefit of vocals. That may be off-putting to some fans who like their music more traditional, but vocals wouldn’t work so well with Cue anyway, Meshbane said.

“I definitely understand where they’re coming from, but with us, we’re so loud it would be pointless to have somebody singing anyway,” she said. “I played classical violin growing up, so I’m really conscious of the melody and how it serves a vocal kind of role.”

The band got its start as a two-piece, when guitarist/bassist/keyboard player Clarke Dominick and drummer Jason Brister made their tentative first steps into Austin’s eclectic and competitive music scene. In 2000, guitarist Colin Swietek, part of the San Marcos indie scene and occasional member of electro-rock group The Octopus Project, moved to Austin and joined the two, and the trio released “Keep Busy,” their first full-length album, in 2001. Meshbane, formerly of the Tunahelpers, joined later that year, and in 2005, “Bring Back My Love” landed amid glorious praise from critics of the indie scene. “Wedding Song” followed in June.

The composition of Cue’s music, Meshbane said, is an organic process, with each member bringing a part to the table and the remaining bandmates creating their own parts over the top of it. It’s sort of an improv-in-the-studio kind of thing, something that creates a work of art that can shift and transform in the live setting, depending on how well the members remember exactly how they played their parts in the studio.

“The whole writing process, for me at least, is kind of like an improv,” Meshbane said. “When we play live, sometimes I can’t remember what I played in the studio, so I have to play something similar, and after a couple of years of doing that, you kind of figure out what your part is. I don’t think we do as much live as you might expect; I always thought there was more improv stuff going on, but maybe everybody else in the band is better at remembering it.”

She laughs, a pleasant sound that gives away the quirky and spirited nature that seems to make Cue, at least the band as of “Wedding Song,” so much fun. The members had a brush with death the last time Cue played Knoxville, but Meshbane and her bandmates can even see the humor in that.

“We tried to go to Hot Springs (N.C.) one time, and we almost died — we didn’t ask for directions because we thought we would be able to find it, and since we don’t have mountains where we’re from, we didn’t know you were supposed to shift into lower gear,” she said — laughing again. “Our brakes totally went out. We were going down this mountain, and the brakes just caught on fire. I was actually really happy when we got out of the car and we weren’t hurtling toward death any more.”

In the end, Meshbane and her co-horts had a good laugh at their misfortune. And it didn’t scare them away from Knoxville entirely — they return on Thursday to perform at The Pilot Light in Knoxville’s Old City. And when it comes to performance, a high-energy show for four people can be just as successful and enthusiastic as a listless show for 100.

“I think a lot of what makes a show successful is how we’re all getting along,” she said. “We’re all really good friends, but if there’s some tension or some brooding, it can make the show even better, because it gives us a chance to work out that hostility on stage.”