Around San Francisco, Creeper Lagoon has won over audiences with its wandering, minimal alterna-pop, ripe with bittersweet melodies and clever turns of lyric. With I Become Small And Go, the band is set to do the same for the rest of the world. All in all, this debut does justice to the Creeps' range and complexity, imbued with a bit of production and songwriting credit from the Dust Brothers. When it's rocking, the band sounds like the Meices or Afghan Whigs; when the group is feeling introspective, Creeper Lagoon is a bit like Seam. Ian Sefchick's low, nasal voice foils well the band's general jangliness, leading his group through often-complex tracks that veer occasionally into electronica, sampling and 10/4 time.

"Tracy" and "Sylvia" are both great girl songs, the former an infectious groove with a cool, detached narrator, the latter a dark, gloomy haiku. And "Dreaming Again" is a track you'll listen to over and over, a sophisticated anthem about "the most beautiful girl with black hair and curls," as perfect a summer love song as you could ask for. Plenty of bands intrigue with elliptical songwriting and obtuse attitude, but not these guys. Creeper Lagoon wants a piece of your friggin' heart and isn't afraid to ask for it.

Creeper Lagoon is the sound of the in-between. Historically, Creeper are between their past as the avant-solo collective project of founder Sharky Laguana and their future as frown prince Ian Sefchick's alt-hit machine. Aesthetically, they're between indie-jangle and art-pop, floating in space between the Matadorian arch-intelligentsia and the miniaturists of the Elephant 6 collective (Olivia Tremor Control, Apples in Stereo). Professionally, they're between indie and the big show: I Become Small and Go is released by the Dust Brothers' label NickelBag, but the band's future contract is held by DreamWorks. And sonically, in the middle of everything, the record's a sky of near-dark jewels.

Of the four songs remixed from a year-old EP, "Sylvia" and "Second Chance" are tonal nods, each mistaking a mood for a song. But "Empty Ships" and "Dear Deadly" are three-minute trips that keep unpacking. The transitory scratch of the former turns out to be a radio broadcasting the story of your life. "Dear Deadly" is a cute shy-boy, all nervous beauty, standing on your porch. "Can't you spend just a little bit of precious time," he hopes, "for the cinema?" But it's the date itself that turns cinematic, sinister and alluring: "Go home, you're lost, just like a superstar / Exhale, release your hate, it's who you are / Come silent, dear deadly." Yikes.

Though three songs receive Dusty remixes, the tracks go much deeper: "Tracy" is a Pavement-pounding parade of skewed images with melody in the place of irony; "Dreaming Again" waxes like a moon in the heavenly romance department. Regrettably, the swirl-and-resolve indie rave-up of Creeper's concert performance gets lost on disc, amid the dreamy imagery and clear-obscure tunes. For now, I Become Small and Go remains the year's prettiest puzzle.

As producer-wunderkinds the Dust Brothers prepare to release their "Greatest Hits" record, the first offering from the Brothers' NickelBag label is already kicking up a little dirt of its own. The band is called Creeper Lagoon, and their first single is "Wonderful Love."

With the new single and several other album tracks produced by Duster John King, the Bay Area band became quickly indoctrinated with the duo's quirky style and soundings, which have graced records ranging from Hanson and Beck to the Beastie Boys. Creeper Lagoon sat down with MTV News recently and discussed working with the heavyweight production team and the experience of being sonically "dusted."

"[The Dust Brother] are song massagers," said vocalist/guitarist Ian Sefchick, "they make them feel better, so we got to have a second chance on a lot of the songs. We'd recorded some of the material already, but there was certain things about it that bugged me for months and months. With John we got to go in there and just redo it, all the stuff we didn't like."

"[John] was like kind of a mid-wife to the whole song process," added guitarist Sharky Laguana, "and he just kind of helped pull that baby out. Made it all come together."

Creeper Lagoon's Sharky Laguana doesn't care a lick for indie cred. In fact, he's kind of a modern-day Charles Atlas: "When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike home from work," says the singer/guitarist. "There was this one long-ass hill, and I'd be like, 'If I don't pedal all the way to the top, I'll never be a professional musician.'" Said ambition (and some of Laguana's skewed logic) makes its way onto I Become Small and Go, the Creepers' more-slick-than-slack full-length debut and one of the initial releases from the Dust Brothers' NickelBag label. On it, the San Francisco outfit-Laguana, singer/guitarist Ian Sefchick, bassist Geoffrey Chisholm, and drummer David Kostiner-spin a guided- by-Robert Pollard knack for hooksmanship into smartly wrought guitar pop that can be shuffle-gaited and psychedelic one moment, wistfully anthemic the next. "I strive to be like a Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd," says Sefchick, tongue only partially in cheek. "You know, bring back timeless music." Still, there's plenty of the latest in obscure sampling, including Bulgarian shepherdess chants and the otherworldly warble of a resonating belt buckle. "It's actually the sound that a woman makes when I take off my belt," Sefchick cracks.

The group's grand sonic yearnings belie their humble origins: Their name derives from the fleabag hotel where Laguana lived and worked after he relocated to San Francisco from Ohio. "I never got any sleep, and I did all the worst drugs," he says. "It was actually more depressing than inspiring." So, given the album's inspired eclecticism, is it safe to presume the drugs have since gotten better? "I experiment with all different kinds of formulas," Laguana says gamely. "All things in...." He stops for a moment. "I was gonna say, 'All things in moderation,' but I think I'll just say, 'All things.'"

The whole idea seemed like one big joke. Ian Sefchick and Sharky Laguana were just two Ohio transplants living in the Bay Area, scraping around in run-down squats and toiling in seedy hotels, holding on to the dream that Creeper Lagoon, their sometime rock band, might actually get a few shows or put out another home-recorded cassette. All they had done was send one of their sketchy demo tapes to Mitchell Frank, the man behind the Silver Lake club Spaceland. All they wanted was a gig. But Frank turned around and asked them if they wanted to put out an album on his NickelBag Records. Laguana, the band's founder, wasn't biting.

"I was like, 'Oh, man, I don't care about your dumb-ass little label...just give me the show, okay?' " says the 28-year-old singer, guitarist, and keyboardist. " 'Your label is not going to help us.' " Then Frank informed him that the co-owners of NickelBag were John King and Michael Simpson, known to most of the world as the Dust Brothers, the ubiquitous production team behind Beck's epic collage Odelay and the Beastie Boys' superfly bachelor-party pastiche Paul's Boutique. (And also Hanson's "MMMBop" and a few Rolling Stones abortions, but why quibble.) "It was like, 'Oh, shit, why didn't you say so, man!' Still, I didn't really believe him. I was such a huge fan. It was like 'Hey, Led Zeppelin wants a new drummer -- and we picked you!' It was so out of the blue."

For most any aspiring pomo popster these days, recording with the Dust Brothers has become part dream, part fraternity-style ritual. And so it was with Laguana; months later, his doubts about Frank's veracity were quashed during the two weeks that King spent remixing three of the band's dreamy, trippy, sloppily ambitious/ambitiously sloppy confections: "Wonderful Love," "Empty Ships," and "Dear Deadly," songs that ended up on Creeper Lagoon's NickelBag debut album I Become Small and Go, which was released May 19. As for the ritual part, Laguana also reveled in some of the rock artifacts lying around the Dust Brothers' ranch-style Silver Lake studio.

"At one point, I'm sitting outside strumming Beck's guitar plugged into Marilyn Manson's portable guitar rig," he says. "Just sitting in the sun, going, 'Oh, I am such a rock star.' "

Sarcasm and self-deprecation notwithstanding, Laguana's declaration is not as ridiculous as he'd like to think. The product of that luminous Hollywood trip is an odd, infectious mix of basement slack and sweeping, shimmering melodicism; the band's use of found sounds -- everything from whistles to a Bulgarian shepherdess chant -- doesn't distract from the most powerful weapon in its arsenal: good, well-crafted songs. Last October, Creeper Lagoon signed to DreamWorks -- a label where, not coincidentally, Simpson works in A&R. Which means that the once-unassuming band is neck-deep in promoting its debut, setting off on tour, and also already deeply involved in composing a follow- up. If this is beginning to sound all too familiar, it's a nice twist that the band actually deserves what it's getting; although you can bet that a multitude of scrawny, white indie-kids armed with boomboxes and samplers will be scrambling out of the shadows until Beck hits the ripe old age of 35, Creeper Lagoon might well be the best of the bunch.

Part of the band's artistic success can be attributed to the dueling tastes of the core members: If you're using archetypes, Laguana is the music geek and Sefchick -- a lanky, mop-topped 26-year-old who seems barely out of his teens -- is the punky gear-head, the Black Flag lover, the one who custom-builds each of their amps with only two settings: loud and off.

"I use circuits from blues amps and overdrive 'em way past 10," he says. "I'm more the boot-stomping, just-do-it-with-guitar type of guy. Sharky uses more weird stuff. He'll go to thrift stores and buy a ton of Hindu hymns or the Irish Glockenburg Duet, bizarre sound stuff. He'll make whole songs out of samples. I'm the AC/DC guy."

Maybe so, but he's not exactly your typical AC/DC guy. Growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ian (pronounced the funny way, with a long "I") Sefchick and Sharky Laguana might have been middle-class white boys -- Laguana's dad was an engineer, Sefchick's an architect -- but, like any number of other middle- class white boys before them, they were also self-styled arty kids -- they painted, they drew, they played music. (If it helps, Sefchick was raised totally macrobiotic; he didn't touch meat until he was 13.) They both attended the exclusive School for Creative Arts in Cincinnati, meeting through mutual friends; two years Laguana's junior, Sefchick was already ditching school and developing a taste for recreational drugs.

"I was kind of a problem child," he admits.

"Indeed he was," says Laguana.

Okay then.

Early on, Sefchick found his muse in the raucous energy of the underground, or at least something close to it: Dinosaur Jr., the Fall, Butthole Surfers, Agitpop. Ironically, it was Laguana who officially introduced him to punk- rock's usual suspects -- Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, and the lower-key Meat Puppets. Both dabbled in making music together, but Sefchick's authority- shirking behavior forced his parents to up and ship him off to a Hindu commune in the Santa Cruz mountains. And get this: According to Sefchick, the place was guided by an Indian guru who hadn't spoken for 30 years, opting instead to write his thoughts on a blackboard. Apparently yearning for the niceties of DIY conversation, Sefchick returned to Ohio for a stretch, and with Laguana, formed a punk band called the Rottweilers, a band that reached its career pinnacle when it landed the opening slot on the Melvins show in 1987. Sadly, the Rottweilers were a short-lived affair. Sefchick moved back to the commune, and Laguana, curious and impressed by Sefchick's transformation into an altogether like-more-mellow person, eventually joined him.

"People there lived a very monklike life," says Laguana, who, at around this time, legally changed his name to the current one; he refuses to go into detail about it. "It was all very much about working hard. A straight-up, no- nonsense place. We were what they call 'Karma Yogis,' which means that you work your ass off for 30 hours a week doing what they call selfless service: building a mile-long creek bed or digging holes in rock."

To which Sefchick chimes in: "Slave labor-type of shit."

Laguana's affection for such living ended about the time he brought a girlfriend to the commune, and she ran off with a fellow Yogi.

"That killed me," Laguana says, understandably. "For a week I was just a zombie, so I moved to San Francisco in 1990 with 10 bucks in my wallet. Didn't know anybody. I was trapped without a car."

He eventually landed a job in a rundown hotel that he nicknamed "Creeper Lagoon" when he started goofing around with his four-track in his bedroom in 1991. Creeper Lagoon, the band -- at that point it was just Laguana -- made its inauspicious debut with (surprise, surprise) a couple of rough homemade basement-tapes: Shasta Complex and Death Sentence. He released his first vinyl in '95, the seven-inch "Creeper Lagoon Vs. the Dead C" (the name being a jokey reference to the titular New Zealand noise outfit and also to Sebadoh's similarly self-deprecating Sebadoh Vs. Helmet EP). The band garnered the usual bit of underground buzz -- positive zine reviews, CMJ charts, and so on. At around that time, "Dead C" made it into the hands of then-Geffen A&R man Luke Wood, who sent him an encouraging letter (and eventually signed the band when he moved to DreamWorks; "the single absolutely killed me," Wood remembers.)

"That was at a time when DGC still had a lot of allure: Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Beck, they were the shit," Laguana says. "I was like, 'Oh my God, how can they know I'm here?' It blew my mind."

Sefchick, meanwhile, had returned to Cincinnati and joined a band called the Stretch Humans (where do they get these names?), but he got bored and eventually went to San Francisco for a visit; Laguana showed him the letter, and two months later, Sefchick was packing his bags for the Bay Area with two songs he had taped on his four-track: "Dear Deadly" and "Tracy."

"Just hearing those demos, I can't tell you how exciting it was," Laguana says. "I've always liked Ian's songwriting, and it was such a good mixture of loops and stuff. The songs were just brilliant and fit perfectly into what I was trying to do."

By 1997, with the release of a self-titled EP on Oakland's indie-rap label Dogday, Laguana had enlisted Sefchick to write, play guitar, and sing a majority of the band's songs. (The rest of the current lineup -- bassist Geoffrey Chisolm and drummer David Kostiner, who recently replaced Patrick Magnan -- slowly followed.) It was around then that Laguana called Frank about a Spaceland show, and the ball started rolling on a proper Creeper Lagoon debut. The resulting IBecome Small and Go is a strange record, one that blends the undeniably catchy rush-pop of "Wonderful Love" -- Sefchick's drawl perfectly offsetting King's magic-wand effects -- with more sinister and murky digressions, such as "Drink and Drive" or "He Made Us All Blind." And the band nicely overcomes the annoying knee-jerk "anything-goes" philosophy that prevails in indie circles these days; beneath the primal beats, luxurious keyboards, and distorted guitar, Creeper Lagoon is more about honest expression than style.

Those first two Sefchick demos ended up as two of the standout tracks: "Dear Deadly" is a fuzzy slice of stoner rock bumped around on a raucous sea of big beats and grandiose keyboard noodling; "Tracy" manages to be both surreal and refreshingly juvenile, especially on its lyrics of unrequited love that dare to convincingly rhyme "brandied pears" with "marble stairs." Both illustrate well Sefchick's dark, dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness writing style, responsible for such lines as "The red light shines in back of me/And I'm tired of Satan's company...Chasing Tracy's all I do/Tracy's rotten all the way through." The Dust Brothers were sufficiently impressed, anyway.

"They just had great songs, great melodies," says Dust Brother King. "Seeing them play live at Small's awhile back just cemented it for me: Ian's so endearing onstage, he's warm and he really draws you in. Also, it was a total pleasure to work with them in the studio because we have similar interests. Sharky and I both like to play online Quake, and we've been known to do a few bong hits."

Which seems to go hand in hand with an affection for the people Laguana claims as his influences, a list that veers wildly from avant-garde composer Meredith Monk to rapper Kool Keith to Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine. It's hardly a surprise that such range has helped CL's music.

"They all tried to make something innovative, new, and exciting," Laguana says, "They taught me that you don't have to put yourself in a box and play one ska song after another because you're a ska band, that you can be a rock band and use a hip-hop beat. Basically, what I took from these people is that you can do anything you want."

And Creeper Lagoon does. After he's completed his interview, Sefchick wanders around an antique slot-machine museum called Musee Mecanique in San Francisco. Considering his band's obsession with gadgetry, it makes sense that he wanted to meet at this spot, a place ringing and buzzing with 80-year-old penny- arcade games that now cost a quarter. Somewhere between the eerie painted lady, the fortune teller, and the hand-cranked mini-movie that features a titillating little pre-sexual-harassment-era boss/secretary tussle (the secretary wins), Sefchick leans over.

"By the way," he says. "You can make up anything about us you want. We don't care."