Born and Thrown on a Hook

Audio Mixer: Rusty Santos.Drink Up Buttercup have built a huge buzz with their energetic live shows and songwriting that distills the golden pop sounds of England and America between approximately 1964 and 1975 into a dizzying, heady brew. The arrangements are uniformly inventive, splicing together bits and pieces of everything that's been waxed since the mid-'60s with a gleefully scattershot approach. The melodies are uniformly catchy; the vocals are marked by harmonies so sweet they could give you diabetes; and James Harvey's lead vocals are always surprising, full of unexpected starts and stops, one minute sweet and folky, the next an uncontained shriek of outrageous psychedelic delight. The same juxtapositions abound in the arrangements. The opening triad starts with "Seasickness Pills," a stomping blend of garage band noise and Brit-pop that drops a Gregorian chant-like interlude into its climax, then moves jarringly into "Animate the Hangtime," a noisy jolt of musique concrète, b