"Is it going to ruin the mystery if I tell you what 27 means?" asks Ayal Naor, who is about to explain the name of his band. "Okay, when I was a kid, my favorite baseball player was Carlton Fisk, and that was his number; it became my lucky number. But I’d hate to have people think it was about something so mundane."

Fear not: this band have more than enough mystery to go around. Formed five years ago by former Spore member Ayor and former Dirt Merchants frontwoman Maria Christopher and since joined by drummer Neil Coulon, 27 have swapped their past experience in guitar-led rock quartets for a relatively clean slate. That much was clear during the first night of this year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, where they played a Kimchee Records showcase for a roomful of jet-lagged indie-rock hipsters. After an ethereal set by Tiger Saw, 27 took the stage with a beautifully twisted blues that sounded like a collaboration between the Cocteau Twins and ZZ Top. It was built on slide guitars, clattering drums, and a hole where the bass line would normally go — and it worked precisely because Christopher’s haunting voice is one of the last you’d expect to hear in such a context.

That song, "Cavalla," turns up as the final track on 27’s sophomore release, Animal Life (Kimchee), where it sounds a bit more austere than the live version but is still a grabber with its soft-to-loud shifts and its long fade into cricket sounds (a lucky accident when recording at home with the windows open, the band say). Like most of the songs on the disc, it makes a virtue of abstraction: the sound shifts from guitar- to sample-driven (and the records sampled range from Charles Mingus to William Shatner), and Christopher’s lyrics suggest more than they reveal — as opposed to her Dirt Merchants days, she screams less but expresses more. Occasionally she’ll let slip an emotional confession (like the heartbreak lines at the end of "Undone") that puts the album’s general sense of melancholia in context. "I thought we were making a nice upbeat record, but everybody’s amazed that I think that," Naor muses when he and Christopher sit down with me over coffee at Davis Square’s Diesel Café.

When one considers the members’ history, a band like 27 make perfect sense: they got the loud rock out of their systems and were ready to reach for something a little deeper. But that would be assuming that they ever planned anything out, which they didn’t. If anything inspired this group, it’s that Naor and Christopher were open to collaborating, and that they’d gotten hold of home recording equipment and a sampler. "If anything has changed, it’s the technology we use in recording," Naor notes. "We started out wanting to be even less of a rock band, but it still gravitated toward rock because of our experiences. Then we got a computer and started throwing samples around and started thinking those songs were as good as the rock ones. If there’s a general idea, it’s that we’re taking songs that fit in with our background and blending them with our experimentation with technology."

Read between the lines, however, and you can see a bit of reaction against their previous bands. Spore, who broke up in the early ’90s but still reunite once in a blue moon (singer Mona Elliott now fronts Victory at Sea), were well ahead of the current local fascination with volume and distortion. "I still like heavy music, but I played it for a lot of years and feel that I got out what I had to say," Naor explains. "When I see bands doing heavy music these days, I get the feeling that it’s all been done. Bands think that it makes them intense if they turn their guitars up, and it doesn’t."

One also suspects that Christopher was encouraged to play the glamorous frontwoman’s role after the Dirt Merchants got signed to a major label (they made two albums for Sony, but only the first got released) and that she’s more comfortable in the current setting, where she can stand still, concentrate on her playing, and be quietly intense. "Our gigs require all three of us to play well, and you wouldn’t want to be the one that drops the ball," she says. A private person, she admits that she’s better able to be emotional in song lyrics when they’re not about her. "Something like ‘Undone’ comes from the experiences of certain people that I’m close to. For some reason, the lyrics come out a lot more naturally when it’s something I feel no emotions about."

To the bandmembers’ surprise (and partly because their first CD was issued on Relapse), most of their audience has come from punk/metal circles rather than being the alterna-rock fans they expected. "I was sure people weren’t going to get us at all," Naor admits. "I think we’re popular there because the punk shows are all-ages, and the kids really want to hear music; they’ll go and sit there absolutely silent. I wasn’t much of a metal fan before we started playing out, but now I can at least distinguish a good metal band from a bad one."

SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE may have written a nastier love song than the Takers’ "The Only Reason" (on their Rubric EP Never Get Out of These Blues Alive), but one sure doesn’t spring to mind. As it is, the chorus proudly jumps right over the bounds of good taste and sensitivity: "I don’t care about you baby, even if I should/The only reason that I fuck you is to make my cigarette taste good!" The sound harks back to that of the Stooges and the various teenage brats on the Nuggets/Pebbles compilations, as if the Takers had figured out what those bands were thinking but didn’t dare say.

"I’ve lost friends over my being in this band," confesses bassist Nick Blakey (formerly of the In Out and Peter Prescott’s Peer Group) over salad at Cambridge’s S&S Deli. "People somehow got it into their heads that we’re the most vile people this side of [Anal Cunt leader] Seth Putnam or GG Allin." Adds former Red Bliss singer Mike Carreiro, who looks surly enough to not be messed with, "Must be their personal insecurities, because we’re such nice guys."

Formed two years ago, the band have made some big waves in recent months, thanks in part to an opening slot at the Mission of Burma reunion show at the Paradise. They also played a memorable show in Austin, though for different reasons: the sound system at their club was screwing up, so they ditched their regular set and played a long noise jam that was capped off by Chris Keene’s kicking over his drum kit and Carreiro’s trashing a microphone stand. The bandmembers also met under volatile circumstances. Blakey was working at Jacque’s, where Keene and guitarist Mike Hibarger were playing with their previous band, the Daviess County Panthers. "I had to throw Chris out of the club," Blakey recalls. "Mike and Chris had a fight on stage; Mike was starting a song and Chris said, ‘Don’t tell me how to start a song, motherfucker.’ It was their last song, and I wouldn’t let Chris back in to get his drums." Adds Keene, "We’ve been a happy family ever since."

In fact the Takers have a fair amount of tragedy and misery in their background. The Daviess County Panthers (basically a regrouped version of the Tulips) disbanded after singer Suzette Fontaine — a fine frontwoman whose words were full of pain, sex, and intrigue — took her own life two years ago on Valentine’s Day. Meanwhile Blakey was going in and out of hospitals, with a double whammy of tinnitus and asthma. "I see this as a rebirth from tragedy," he says in a serious moment. "If I hadn’t found these guys, I would have been home listening to my George Harrison bootlegs." So it’s no wonder there are "blue" references in both the band’s disc titles — their first full-length, If the Blues Were Red, was recorded in Memphis and is due out in early summer. "I like to think we have a vein of blues running through us," Keene says. "We cringe at the notion of sounding contemporary."

One might assume that songs like "The Only Reason" have done wonders for the bandmembers’ love lives. "Mike has the best relationship of anybody in the band," says Blakey, indicating Carreiro. "That song is a little harsh," Carreiro adds. "I think it’s something that a lot of people have felt — including women, because a lot of them have told me they like that song." So does Blakey’s dad, he points out. "That was the biggest shock of my being in the group: my 65-year-old father actually likes us."