CSI: Athens

Cinemechanica is hyperactive as fuck. The Athens quartet — drummer Mike Albanese, bassist Joel Hatstat and guitarists/vocalists Andy Pruett and Bryant Williamson — churns out smashmouth action rock full of complicated time changes and ramped-up sequences. Meanwhile, Williamson and Pruett sing-shout lyrics that are mostly unintelligible. Think Drive Like Jehu, Unwound, At the Drive In and other math-rock bands, all of whom are credited on Cinemechanica's MySpace page (www.myspace.com/cinemechanica) under the category "Sounds Like."

"I really wish we had printed out the lyrics," says Williamson of Cinemechanica's debut album, The Martial Arts, as he downs a can of Sparks at Room 13 in Athens. Even the name "Cinemechanica," which is taken from an Italian company that makes film equipment, is obscure and hard to pronounce.

"The topics of the songs are all based on a general paranoia brought about by the public not understanding what's really going on in regards to anything, like governmental and the bullshit from the media," continues Williamson, who adds that Pruett writes the lyrics, and he writes the music for them. "No one freakin' knows what the hell is going on. It's frustrating. Like, who do we trust? That's the overall theme of the lyrics." You wouldn't know this from the titles of the songs, which bear clever names like "Antsinjapants," "Bruckheimer" and "I'm Tired of Paul McCartney."

"[Bruckheimer] is one of our more focused ideas," says Williamson. "It's about a type of individual that has so many productive ideas, and talks about these ideas, and talks about what they're going to do, and it just doesn't get done. And it's like, don't pretend like you're going to do it, dude. If you're not going to do it, then just fucking let it go, just let us know you're not going to do it, let us know it's not going to get done, and we'll fucking move on and find someone else who's going to do it."

It sounds pretty serious. "I feel like this song is the most frustrated and personal," says Williamson. "We don't write any songs about girls or anything, that's for sure. But it's hard for us being in a rock band and trying to get things done. A lot of people that we hang out with and try to get to help us out are chilled-out musicians, you know what I mean? They take it easy. I'm like that to a degree, but I'm very business-oriented, and want to make sure everything gets done."

It's weird that "Bruckheimer" is titled after Jerry Bruckheimer, since the famed producer of Hollywood monstrosities like Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Bad Boys and the "CSI" TV franchise is clearly a productive man. "Exactly!" says Williamson, chuckling. "We're looking for the Bruckheimer!"

Williamson is all over the place, and it's not just because of the alcohol-and-caffeine kick he gets from drinking Sparks. He runs Hello Sir Records, a label that just shipped The Martial Arts to online retailers and local shops. (Its official release for national brick-and-mortar stores is May 23.) Other bands featured in Hello Sir's small but growing catalog include Maserati, Tiger Bear Wolf and We Versus the Shark. Neither profits from the band nor the label cover all of Williamson's bills, though, so he also works the door at Caledonia Lounge in Athens.

As a group, Cinemechanica adopts multiple identities, including Contraband, which plays the soundtrack to the old-school Nintendo war game Contra at raucous one-off shows. Less notoriously, it also plays shows as Megaband, mining the soundtrack to the cutesy Nintendo video game Mega Man.

Contraband and Megaband, however, are indistinguishable from Cinemechanica. In all three incarnations, Albanese, Hatstat, Pruett and Williamson play aggressive, jump-up music.

"We're definitely our own band," says Williamson when asked about all the pop and indie influences his quartet draws from. "I listen to so many songs like, 'Oh, that's a Smashing Pumpkins riff.' Like obviously, dude. You're not going to listen to our record and think that. ... I feel like, if you have knowledge of indie-rock music, there are a lot of aspects that make it unique."