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It's not easy keeping a band together.

School, 9-to-5 jobs, families -- all are factors in whether a group can maintain a schedule of rehearsal, recording and gigging. When band members move to different cities, it makes things even more difficult.

When they move to opposite ends of the country, however, it can be downright impossible to make it work. But somehow, the guys in the Diacon-Panthers are committed to doing whatever it takes to keep playing together.

"I could keep writing the same stuff that I'm writing here, anywhere, and play it with anyone, but it wouldn't sound half as good or half as interesting," singer/guitarist Natan Diacon-Furtado told The Daily Times this week. "When we first started playing together, I think any of us could have gone and played with any other band found the same thing, but now we've got an understanding that takes a long time to build up.

"That understanding is where we're still pushing to sound different. To me, 'Make it Feel Better' (the band's most recent album) still sounds great -- I thought I would hate it after a while, but I don't, and we're writing new songs in practice. I think the consensus is that we've figured out we can play well together, tightly, and still sound kind of weird."

Diacon-Furtado and his bandmates -- guitarist Greg Given (who attends Reed College in Portland, Ore., with Diacon-Furtado), bassist/pianist Jeremy Given (a student of Berklee College of Music in Boston) and drummer Charlie Henschen (an undergraduate at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt.) -- were in high school when they first put together the group. They had no intention of putting their secondary educations on the back burner, but neither did they want to give up what they were passionate about, either.

And with summer and winter breaks giving them an opportunity to reunite in their hometown, Knoxville seemed like a logical base of operations, Diacon-Furtado added.

"One of the reasons we keep coming back is because of the scene here," he said. "Knoxville has so many bands that don't sound like each other, but we all play so many shows together and are still friends. The scene is one of the reasons we sound like we do.

"Whenever there's a band in Knoxville first starting out, they can do whatever they want, and people will listen to it and decide whether they like it without complaining about it not sounding like something else. The Portland scene isn't like that -- if there's going to be something weird, it's got to be something a lot of bands are doing."

"Make It Feel Better" doesn't qualify as "weird" in an off-putting sense; its charm is in how the four guys have crafted an album that's outside the zone of familiarity, especially in comparison to other local bands. East Tennessee's indie rock scene is blessed with a plethora of unique-sounding groups, and "Make It Feel Better" catapults the Diacon-Panthers to the forefront of that crowd.

There's a distinctive Southern touch to the indie rock on "Make It Feel Better" -- maybe it's Diacon-Furtado's vocals, which sound like Neil Young fronting a stripped-down version of Modest Mouse. The guys show a flair for versatility -- from the stripped-down, mournful sound of "Actress" to the instrumental maelstrom of "St. Anthony" to the epic "American Creature," from the sunny-sounding "Minor Tiger" to the slow burn of "Monster," which starts off slow and builds to a frenetic tempest of guitars and wails and drums rattling the whole affair like a raging thunderstorm. It's a gem to hear, and one that no doubt was exciting for the guys to make.

For the brief time the guys are back together this summer (they only have a week before heading out on a mini-tour and one more Knoxville show, on June 20 at The Birdhouse in Knoxville's Fourth and Gill neighborhood, before heading back to school), they're concentrating on new songs, Diacon-Furtado added.

"I think a lot of bands go from their first record to being a little more confusing and complicated on their second record," he said. "I would say the new songs we're doing sound confused, but not confusing. The idea is to make it sound grittier and more confused while, at the same time, sounding like we know exactly what we're doing.

"No matter how we record them, though, they're never going to sound exactly the same live. It's not hard to bring them out live, but a lot of the songs on 'Make It Feel Better' were done in one take, and one of them, we only practiced it for two minutes before we played it for the first time ever as a group, right there in the studio.

"That's kind of a blessing, though, coming back and playing without too many practices," he added. "We can recapture the song without exactly knowing what we're going to do until it happens in the moment."