Walri's music lilts, just like the falling leaves outside the band's Windsor Street crib. Piled into what would typically be a living room, the band is hard at work writing and rehearsing a curious brand of unconventional pop music it likes to call "love rock." The band's appeal is in its quirk, its contradiction; the music is cloaked in convention - or vice versa. Walri (plural for walrus) loves pop music, and tweaks it with an antagonizing streak. Then it turns around to tweak those tweaks with more pop.

"I think one thing that characterizes our band is we're slightly unexpected always," says singer/songwriter/guitarist Amos Rosenstein. You really don't know what to expect from this band. The members - Dave Goebel, drums; Chris Coon, organ; and Geoff Saunders, bass - are all unassuming, casual wash 'n' wear types, except for Rosenstein, who looks like the dude on the Pringles can, with his waxed moustache parked under a pork pie hat. "We're always upsetting expectation," he says. "We try and have hidden forms and things in our music that come out upon analysis."

Sounds like a scientist talking - or someone who takes what music critics have to say seriously. In regards to the former, Rosenstein and organist Chris Coon began playing together six years ago while they were both attending UR. It wasn't until two years later that they realized they were both physics majors.

"It just never came up," says Rosenstein. At this point the band that would become Walri was called the Manta Rays, and Rosenstein wasn't happy. The band didn't share his vision. He decided to clean house.

"Slowly I dropped out the other members," he says. "I was writing the songs and I knew I had a vision for these songs that was beyond what we were doing. [The other members] were too conventional, they were stuck in other styles, they didn't think widely enough. They were not aware of this, and unfortunately wanted to continue playing in the band. So painful as it was, I let them go."

Along came drummer Dave Goebel and bassist Geoff Saunders to fill the void. It clicked for Rosenstein right away.

"I was like, ‘OK, it can be this good,'" he says.

Being on the same musical wavelength was definitely key. But it's the jangle and chime of Rosenstein's guitar that puts inescapable, unavoidable, undeniable hooks in the listener's head. These guys are seriously influenced by The Beatles, beyond just finding a good hook and running with it. Phase shifting, reverb, and other tonal experiments add to the magical mystery in a pleasant AM-radio kind of way. According to the band, it's a combination of a little bit of experimentation and good fortune. It ain't no jam.

"It's not like a jam band at all," Saunders says. "Our tunes are really worked out."

"There's a lot of conscious conversation that goes on about developing the mood and the feel of the songs," Rosenstein says. "But sometimes I find myself saying, ‘See, these songs just write themselves.'" And this is where the spiritual flies in the face of the technical, where uninvited elements introduce themselves to the music and the band finds itself conversely, unwittingly played by the music.

"Sometimes we rock really, really hard," Rosenstein says.

Walri has one album, "Paper Crane," to its credit, is writing new material, and slowly expanding its reach to cities further and further away.

And if the quartet feels it's up for another name change, Goebel suggests Sea Lion. Coon, Goebel, and Saunders nod in approval, but Rosenstein already had one picked out.

"The next incarnation will be called The Angler Fish."

"Yeah," says Coon. "That's even better."

Walri

w/Everthus The Deadbeats, Meddlesome, Meddlesome, Meddlesome Bells

Bug Jar, 219 Monroe Ave

Thursday, October 30

8 p.m. | $5-$7 | 454-2966

myspace.com/walrimusic