E-Mail This Article to a Friend Sleepless in Somerville The late-night vibe of the Information BY JONATHAN PERRY

Max Fresen looks like a guy who doesn’t sleep much. In fact, when he trundles into the Thirsty Scholar Pub in Somerville, a mere stone’s throw from where he lives but 40 minutes late nonetheless, his matted hair plastered every which way over slitted eyes with deep sags under them, he looks as if he’d just roused himself from a direly needed nap or else hadn’t yet been to bed this week. Fresen, singer and principal songwriter for the Boston sextet the Information, apologizes profusely for his tardiness and sidles into a seat next to synth-playing band mate Ashley Moody. Late of the ’90s cyber-camp outfit Servotron, Moody has been holding down the fort talking about the Information’s debut full-length, Mistakes We Knew We Were Making (out this Tuesday, February 8, on Cambridge’s Primary Voltage Records), when Fresen arrives.

"I rarely get to sleep before six o’clock in the morning, and then I wake up at 10 a.m. anyway, so I’m always a little screwed up," Fresen explains. "It sucks to be so nocturnal, and I know it’s not healthy. And moving here [from Florida] has not helped because of the weird sunlight hours. I’ll go a month without seeing the sun and then realize that I’m in a depression because I don’t have any serotonin built up in my head."

In its own glittery, jittery way, Mistakes is as much a late-night creature as the Information’s singer: it’s an album of swirling, post-shoegazer soundscapes, gleaming spires of stabbing guitars, and synths that spume like steam escaping from city manhole covers. Feedback-encrusted echoes of late-’80s/early-’90s pop subversives like the Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive, and Swervedriver reverberate inside "Breaking Me Down" and the bracing fever-dream insomnia of "Bright Lights," the opener that sets the disc alight. "Bright lights, big city, I’ve been awake since oh, 6:30," Fresen sings amid a roiling deluge furnished by the stealthy rumble of Heath Fradkoff’s bass, the unwavering beat of Brad Kayal’s drums, and the tandem guitar roar from Zack Wells and Deb Grant. "I can’t eat, I can’t sleep for all the pills in Tokyo. . . . I got a feeling it’s over now."

Much of the material — which was recorded and mixed by Bob Logan last summer at Boston’s Smallchurch Studios — is directly linked, Fresen says, to the dissolution of a decade-long relationship with his girlfriend. "A lot of these songs are about something that’s over in my personal life, but they were still occupying space in my brain. Now that they’re done, I feel like I can jettison some of that baggage." Still, he realizes the professional distillation of his personal distress is just beginning. What’s more, he says, distancing himself isn’t an option. "No, I think that when I start to do that, I’ll be performing the songs really badly, which sucks because it means you have to either hang on to whatever was originally informing the song or you have to find some new trauma to associate with it."

In the similar, darkly dystopian spirit of Interpol’s 2002 Turn On the Bright Lights (Matador), Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s homonymous 2001 debut on Virgin, and the Rapture’s 2004 Echoes (Strummer/DFA/Universal), Mistakes sounds like its own Gotham in motion, its labyrinthine wires and arteries humming with life and noise. But it’s a city of secrets and bruises, all sprawled under a deceptively sparkling sonic skyline. "People are always trying to compare us to contemporary bands," Fresen says with a slight cringe. "I don’t think that we really listen to any contemporary bands that influence us. And I don’t think that any of these newer bands are trying to sound anything like one another — they’re just all aiming for the same spots in their record collections."

Moody laughs at the misconceptions that have dogged the band since they formed two years ago. "There’s this whole perception of us being so aloof on stage, and in reality, for the first six months, I was scared shitless. It came off as a certain aura for the band, and I don’t know that we ever intended that. I’ve never wanted to be in a band that took itself too seriously. I think we’re perceived that way sometimes, but we’re all major dorks and not cool."

"When we do get slagged on by people who don’t know us that well," Fresen says, "it’s because people tend to think of us as strategizing about how we’re going to present ourselves, and it’s not like that at all for us. The New York bands have already succeeded, so it’s fine if they’re thought of as calculated, but it’s annoying when we get lumped in with them. I’m like, ‘Can you please wait until I’m getting paid for this and it doesn’t matter that you hate us?’ "

The Information play a CD-release party this Wednesday, February 9, at the Paradise, 967 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, with the Good North, Asobi Seksu, and Emergency Music; call (617) 562-8800.