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When listening to "Canaries," the new album by local roots-music band The LoneTones, do not attempt to adjust your CD player.

You may think you're experiencing technical difficulty -- especially as the album's second song, the title track, begins. There's a gentle wave of white noise that fades into the music, something that on an album by any other band would hardly be noticed.

But this is The LoneTones. Led by the husband-wife team of Sean McCollough and Steph Gunnoe, it's a group with deep roots in the local folk scene. McCollough and Gunnoe are activists for a number of causes as much as they are musicians, green advocates who campaign against mountain-top removal and can be counted on to get behind any number of causes that protect the landscape from irresponsible development.

Which makes it even more surprising to hear on "Canaries" something so ... mechanical, for lack of a better word.

"I think there's something really pleasing about dissonance," Gunnoe told The Daily Times this week. "I think we're really melodically driven musicians, but it's so pleasing to somehow wed something really melodic with a more complex dissonance or background. After a while, you begin to kind of lose interest in your earlier work, and on 'Canaries,' I truly like that old keyboard we found with the crazy noises it can make. We're pretty happy with this record, and it may be a prototype for a new style."

That dissonance may seem out-of-place on an initial listen to "Canaries," but repeated plays find McCollough and Gunnoe at a creative peak. The sound effects are understated -- sly and soft, contributing to a song's mood or melody in almost indefinable ways. The layers are arranged in gorgeous stacks, like the shimmering icing of a wedding cake -- intricate, detailed and personable. Gunnoe's girlish voice is another instrument in the mix, and as it swirls and bobs on a sea of lush instrumentation, there's a dreamlike quality to "Canaries" that's fascinating and endearing.

The new sound, according to McCollough, has been a natural evolution; the confidence that shines through on "Canaries" comes from two people growing into their relationships -- with one another, with their bandmates and with the music itself.

"I think it was really a fairly organic process," McCollough said. "The more we played together and wrote songs together, the more music we found that we have in common and felt natural to us. When we started playing, we were doing more traditional Old Time stuff, and that was fun, but both of us have other stuff in us, too.

"I think 'Canaries' has evolved out of who we are. We're conscious of it in that we let ourselves grow, but at the same time, how we've grown has been sort of an unconscious thing."

The LoneTones were born out of a chance encounter between Gunnoe and McCollough at Barley's Taproom back in 2000. A native of West Virginia, Gunnoe had moved to East Tennessee to attend graduate school and fallen in love with the local roots music scene, which reminded her of home. McCollough was already known in folk circles as a solo performer and member of the group Evergreen Street. Together, they formed a duo (their first public gig, incidentally, was a wedding at The Palace Theater in downtown Maryville) before adding other members to the lineup. A debut album, "Useful," was followed a couple of years ago by "Nature Hatin' Blues," but lineup changes and a broader ear for a song's individual needs meant a shift in direction for "Canaries," McCollough said.

"We would hear a certain sound on one song, so we would go buy a keyboard that would do it," he said. "We wanted piano on another song, so we bought an older keyboard with a nice piano sound. It grew out of what we were hearing in our heads."

A loose template, both said, would be the seminal Wilco album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Not that Gunnoe or McCollough would compare their band or their music to Wilco or that particular album, but that band's willingness to experiment and make a radical shift from the Americana roots for which it had been known up to that point was inspiring.

"It's a pretty inspirational album in that they're basically folk songs, but you really find yourself listening to all of the stuff they're trying out," McCollough said. "We didn't experiment to that degree, but it was really good to hear the songs standing up on their own and the songwriter saying, 'We're not satisfied with it being just that; where else can we take it?'"

Pushing themselves that way has been artistically satisfying in ways that previous efforts have not. Gunnoe, who spent time in Washington State soaking up the grunge and riot-grrl scenes, wanted to give the music more of an edge; McCollough wanted to push himself in their home studio as the album's producer.

"You want to satisfy yourself," Gunnoe said. "I've felt like I have much more of an edge to me, and I think this record is my way of being OK with that. Deciding that that edge was an important part of me has been really helpful. It's really appealing to make music about the place that you're in, but there's something very freeing about keeping the same sort of instrumentation but using it in a different way."

If anything, Gunnoe had to resist pressure to speed up "Canaries" -- to make it, in her words, more danceable. To that end, McCollough served as the counter-balance, she added. His standing as a folkie helped her stay grounded, and her edge helped him get out of his comfort zone. How "Canaries" will be received by the public is still to be determined, but by its very nature, it's an album that offers so much more than what LoneTones fans have come to expect.

"It's really weird to think about how it'll be received, but you have to remember that you're just doing it for yourself," Gunnoe said. "I think people are kind of adventuresome, so I hope they'll like it. I know we do."