E-Mail This Article to a Friend New blood Read Yellow and Lock and Key reinvigorate the local scene BY MATT ASHARE

It’s Saturday evening, and the four members of Read Yellow are in town from Amherst to participate in what’s become something of a rite of passage for local bands over the past two decades — they’re performing live on the college station WERS. Their next trip in from Amherst will be somewhat more permanent now that 21-year-old bassist Michelle Kay Freivald (Read Yellow’s youngest member) is graduating from UMass: after two and a half years together, the band have opted to make Boston their base of operations. "We’re always coming to Boston to play, to see shows, and our label and management are here," drummer Paul Koelle explains.

"It’s just a little different now that we’re not all in school in Amherst," Freivald continues. "It can be fun to not be in school and hang out there. But being in the city is more for us. And we’re going to be touring so much that it doesn’t really matter where we live."

"Plus," Koelle interjects, "everyone seems to know us as a Boston band, so we might as well be in Boston."

True enough. Over the past year, as they’ve consolidated their relationship with Fenway Recordings, putting out a promising four-song EP last year and then, just last month, celebrating the release of their full-length debut, Radios Burn Faster (both on Fenway), word has been spreading quickly about Read Yellow. And like Dinosaur Jr. and Buffalo Tom before them, they strengthened their ties to the local scene when they chose veteran producer Paul Kolderie, who’s worked on everything from big major-label albums by Hole, Radiohead, and Morphine to hundreds of other smaller local and national indie projects over the past 20 years, to helm the board for Radios Burn Faster. Much of the album was even recorded at Kolderie’s studio on Camp Street in Cambridge, the former home of Fort Apache, a room where Kolderie left his mark on formative indie-rock recordings by Dinosaur Jr., Buffalo Tom, and Uncle Tupelo, to name three, and where some of the Pixies’ best material was put on tape. Indeed, with their angular, intersecting guitars, their taste for the finer things in art-damaged, post-punk avant-rock (churning distortion, squealing feedback, and chords that hover on the edge of Sonic Youthian dissonance), and a muscular boy/girl rhythm section schooled in the post-harDCore ways of Fugazi and Jawbox, Read Yellow have positioned themselves as rightful heirs to a loud yet literate, strident yet subtle Amerindie sonic legacy that emerged in the ’80s and survived just below the commercial alterna-rock radar throughout the ’90s.

But before I go overboard and proclaim Read Yellow the best new thing to happen to Boston rock since the Pixies and before they head over to soundcheck at ERS, Freivald, Koelle, and guitarists Evan Kenney and Jesse Vuona, who will be opening for Secret Machines this Tuesday at T.T. the Bear’s Place, have stopped by another local rock landmark, the Middle East, to talk shop. All four sing, shout, and whisper on Radios Burn Faster. And there’s so much role switching on stage, with Kenney, Vuona, and Freival handing their instruments off to one another between songs, Kenney and Vuona engaging in call-and-response vocal duals that parallel their back-and-forth rhythm/lead work, and everyone, including Koelle on drums, taking brief moments in the spotlight, that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of who’s doing what. Even at their most chaotic, at those crucial points when Kenney and Vuona have their backs to an audience as they go off on their own to rip, writhe, and flail at their guitars, Read Yellow seem to function as one unit. And much the same is true when we grab a table outside the Middle East, where the evening traffic serves as an appropriate noisy backdrop to our conversation. It’s not that all four agree on everything — a quick trip to www.readyellow.com reveals that whereas Michelle likes Stone Roses and New Order, Evan and Jesse list Fugazi as a favorite. But they have a charming habit of finishing one another’s thoughts and sentences, and you quickly get the sense that they’ve arrived at similar conclusions about what they stand for as a band.

Which is not to suggest that Radios Burn Faster is quite so easy to pin down. For all the obvious Sonic Youth and Jawbox comparisons (in their sound and in having a female bassist), it’s a deceptively complex album, full of dissonant guitar detonations, chaotic noise refrains, and serrated shards of provocative if often esoteric poetry, all tempered with just enough melodic flow and reassuring garage-punk abandon to give even the most abstract tracks a sense of anthemic coherence. And there’s a balance between fragile avant excursions and hard-driving, wall-of-guitar numbers like "Fashion Fatale," which owes an obvious debt to the Make-Up/International Noise Conspiracy axis of rock-and-roll idealism — there are even a few Chuck Berryisms in the solo, along with a "Yeah baby!" or two or three. The strident political edge of "Model America," with its shouted choruses of "Shut out! Shut out! Shut out!", gives way to a not-so-silly little love song with ominous overtones ("I’m far too far now sweetheart to hardly recover/Entangled in wires my abstinence is discovered") and a dark sort of romanticism ("Oh the crazy things that young lovers do/You’ll fall in line with the murder of time"). When Michelle takes over lead-vocal duties for a couple of songs after the minute-and-a-half feedback intro to "Static," the mood changes yet again as she leads the band into the closest thing the album has to a ballad, the sweetly sung "Soleil," which builds back up to a cacophonous feedback-fed crescendo with the boys joining in to shout "Soleil, soleil."

"I think the album really shows what we’ve listened to and what we’ve all grown up on," Vuona offers. "Yeah," Kenney agrees, "I think everything you listen to is going to influence your band." Which is to say, this quartet are proud to wear all of the above-mentioned influences on their sleeves, even as they weave their identity out of the fraying fabric of 20 years of underground sounds. And why not? After all, Read Yellow, who started as the Sharks before realizing that there were at least a couple of other bands out there with that name, seem to have been in the right places at the right times to hook up with the right people, from Kolderie to Fenway owner Mark Kates, the former Geffen/DGC A&R scout who worked with the likes of Sonic Youth and Nirvana before being hired by the Beastie Boys to run their now defunct Grand Royal label, then re-emerged here in Boston to build his own label from the ground up.