Artist Alert:The Aliens

Here's a band you might want to check out: Fused together from the scattered remnants of Scotland's The Beta Band comes a motley, shape-shifting trio of green, large-headed extraterrestrials from space. Right. But you might think that if you were an incompetent record store browser looking at Astronomy for Dogs, the grandiose 2007 debut album from The Aliens.

Admittedly, Fool at the Record Store, on first impression, the celestial nature of this album might tempt you to fantasize about spaceships zooming over your dumb head. God forbit you're hounded by images of that silver screen darling Gort finally destroying the earth (or at least enough lame cardboard cutout bands to save rock and roll). But luckily for you, these Aliens don't get too tangled up in trying to redefine music that they lose sight and sense of their own. The result is an album that flows so completely within its own boundaries that those boundaries become limitless without overlapping into other lines of music and forcing something alien upon itself.

Recent times have been harsh on the self proclaimed "classic rock" that our parents listened to. So much so that we feel the need to dub it "classic." And while this evolution of taste has given rise to a plethora of new and wonderful sounds, most of whatever's left of rock and roll lacks a certain element of timelessness. Of course, I don't have any idea what that element is (otherwise I'd be milking it up the wazoo), but when you listen to something you can usually tell if it's going to be around for a while. Not to say that Astronomy for Dogs is the next Abbey Road, but it's certainly something more than a happy stroll down memory lane and it certainly stands out.

The opener, "Setting Sun," might be straight out of the '60s, a more explosive and complex "California Dreaming," eventually evolving into a thematic repetition of "We are the Aliens." That line assumes catch-phrase status as it is also boastfully declared at the end of the glittering "I Am the Unknown," a soulful psyche-rocker that continuously builds up a crazed, makes-me-giddy-with-energy, type of energy. "Tomorrow" could easily be the extravagant sequel to The Beatles' "Yesterday" while the catchy, yet almost lyric-less "The Happy Song" is essentially the new theme song for LSD. The strangely beautiful "She Don't Love Me No More" plays more like a movie than a song, with a piano and violin arrangement that echoes U2's "All I Want Is You/November."

Lead singer Gordon Anderson, fully recovered from his mental breakdown, drones in a hippy Jim Morrison/British-accented Trey Anastasio from the future tone; his voice doesn't overpower but it doesn't have to. There is always so much musical complexity in each song that you really forget about the singing and listen instead to the song as an all-encompassing combination of sounds.

The physcotic, shape shifter "Rox" begins by chaotically swirling around an evil toy shop inside a gospel church and then seamlessly transferring into a disco type groove before shifting to '60s psych rock then to alternative and finally to a synth-laden, Egyptian-themed conclusion. That's about the easiest way to describe it without dancing on Robert Browning's grave. And that's pretty much what it's like throughout the whole album.

Maybe the only clinker of the bunch is "Robot Man" (ironically their third single). Granted, the song is catchy at first , but in the end it's just a little too much of everthing people hated about the 60's.

Somewhere hidden in Astronomy may be the recurring idea of a lost love, but really each track simply builds upon the scattered identity of the previous one, giving the album this mesmerizing illusion of depth.

There are traces of The Beatles, The Doors, Oasis, the Mamas and the Papas, the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, and the Monkeys all throughout this voyage and certainly this album steals a little bit from every rock band of the past 50 years. But aside from being a "trip" into the past, Astronomy for Dogs succeeds in creating its own memorable songs that toe the line of becoming epic. Allmusic.com categorizes The Aliens as neo-psychedelic which I think is code for "we hit our editor in the face with a chair and he said 'Neo-Psychedelic!'."

The truth is that The Aliens are able to use their influences to create something completely original. It's rock, but it's also something else. It's grandeur at the expense of preconception. Melodies that soar just high enough to blur. And wherever you decide to classify The Aliens, Astronomy for Dogs is worth a listen to just for the novelty of it. That and the fact that it's a hell of a ride.

"The Aliens have landed," notes the band's official Web site (thealiens. musicblog.co.uk), and they're available on iTunes (and Ruckus for all you thriftmongers). You won't find them touring the states right now, Enlightened Record Store Loiterer, but after listening to Astronomy for Dogs you might find yourself staring at the stars and wondering just where in the universe the Aliens came from (and then you'd be incompetent again because they're from the UK).