But division st. never intended to incorporate the rawness of starting a new band into their music. Call their songs "radio-ready," call them "slick," or just call them sleek pop songs -- division st. are a local band playing a style of music that usually goes unacknowledged until it stops being local.

"The people who would buy a division st. record don't necessarily go to the clubs," continues Bluestein over a Super Bowl Sunday brunch with the other street residents: singer/guitarist Isaac Hasson, bassist Thom Scheller, drummer John Donzzi. "There's a big market out there between the clubgoers and the concertgoers who like to buy a record and might come to see you if you came once a year if you play the Orpheum or the Centrum, but never go to T.T.'s, never go to Mama Kin's. And we sell a lot of records to those people."

Which goes a long way toward saying that division st.'s debut album will never have to struggle under the burden of being labeled "alternative." Begging comparisons with any number of more-contemporary songwriters like Bruce Hornsby, Sting, and Alan Parsons, Standing on Ceremony (Plaid Cat) is a collection of nine layered, occasionally jazzy, catchy songs that bear no trace of the usual roughness or loose threads associated with debut releases. From the opening "Live for You," an anthemic, harmony-driven declaration laced with piano frippery, to the introspective "Where I Belong" to the rootsy, gentle "Somewhere That's Home" to the softly soaring guitar ballad "Where I Belong," division st. set a mood with their viscerally elegant melodies and Hasson's broad, distinctive vocals.

"We're not a riff band," says Bluestein. "When we write a song we focus on the strong melody and chords that take you somewhere." Bluestein and Hasson, who write all of division st.'s songs, have been together as friends and songwriters all through high school and later at Berklee; they teamed up with Donzzi when a fellow student offered to produce some of their early songs. Scheller joined a year later, and division st. began inventing their tunes in the studio and then learning how to play them live.

"We had done so many things while recording," says Hasson, "it took a while to prepare our music to go from the studio to live." The crucial word is "prepare." Although they save their creative energies for actual studio composition, division st. are almost hyper-concerned to disguise themselves as a band who could be played on any adult contemporary station (while recording Standing on Ceremony, Bluestein would call out, "That's the 'BOS track!") and not let their inexperience show. And with carefully laid-out songs, skillful album artwork, and an avoidance of local-scene attachments, they're doing a fair job of camouflage. But, says Donzzi, "I hope it never seems that we're more focused on business than we are music, because for us, music comes first. But if someone is really successful and pretends they didn't have at least some idea what was going on, then they're trying to fool you, I think."

"The bottom line is," says Scheller, "we want to do this for a very long time. And it would be foolish of us not to take it seriously, in every detail, to make it happen."

-- Randee Dawn Cohen