The Chicago band Tenki has graduated from pop oddity to maturity, and contrary to what you might imagine, the transformation is anything but dull. After last year's playful debut Red Baby, Tenki has just released View of an Orbiting Man on the Quad Cities' Future Appletree label. The record has emotional and musical heft, and while it's enveloped by a sober air, the compositions are surprising and invigorating, resulting in a record that's full of life.

The band didn't perform in the Quad Cities at all for a year and half, but Tenki has put itself back in regular rotation at area venues. On the heels of its new album, the band will perform on Saturday at the Quad Cities Brew & View.

View of an Orbiting Man is clearly an adult work, concerned with heavy topics and without much play. The press materials throw out this bone: "Using the metaphor of a satellite to observe his own losses from a distance, lyricist J. Toal looks back on divorce, death, and failed love experiments, only to finally come to terms with a sort of abstract redemption."

Oh, yes. View of an Orbiting Man could be described as a concept album. Tenki vocalist, lyricist, and guitarist Jamie Toal laughs at the label, fraught with the memories of dozens of self-important prog-rock stinkers. "It's such a dangerous term," he said. "But I like concept albums." Toal stresses that while there are recurring themes, there's no story on View of an Orbiting Man. "There are a lot of issues of loss," he said, including the process of reacting to it and "coming to terms with everything."

When asked to be more specific, he was coy, saying only that the issues include family deaths and failed relationships. "It's love loss on many different levels, how your reality shifts," he said.

Tenki has retained its core of Toal (a Davenport native and veteran of Tripmaster Monkey), keyboardist and trumpeter Jeff Wichmann (who records under the name Dexter Gold and has performed with Multiple Cat), and lead guitarist Jeff Kmieciak. Between Red Baby and the new album, the band changed its rhythm section, adding bassist Brian Daley and drummer Sean Burke. (Since the new album was recorded, the group has added a sixth member: Garen Gaston on keyboard, percussion, and cornet.)

The personnel changes freed the band, Toal said: "Sean and Brian are less regimented in their instrumentation."

Tenki felt that Red Baby was a good starting point but not something that would last. "It was definitely very derivative, which is fine," Toal said. "It seemed like it was sort of a sample."

View of an Orbiting Man is more cohesive, a result both of what Toal wanted to accomplish lyrically and the band's goals musically. The words and tunes were "like two trains running parallel," Toal said.

Lyrically, he said, "I felt I wanted to purge a few subjects," and the band was looking to craft something coherent. "We wanted it to sound like it was coming from the same place," Toal said. "We wanted to focus on a sound. We weren't going for big variety."

"Love Sick" is a stunning opener, layering instruments on the opening melancholic strumming and vocals. Bass and a minimalist, squalling lead guitar kick in at one point, and that surprise is augmented later by a sudden blast of six-string noise followed by a horn solo that nothing in the song had set up. As first tracks go, they don't get much better; it's a good song, first and foremost, but it also serves as a warning: Stay on your toes, because Tenki's not afraid to mix things up.

The track is "an overview of the whole album," Toal said. "If it were a movie, it would start with that, and the whole movie would be a flashback."

The second track, "All of the Gravity, None of the Weight," continues in the rock vein, and I started to notice something familiar. View of an Orbiting Man has the pop sheen, rock muscle, and earnestness of The Soundtrack of Our Lives' Behind the Music and combines them with the fussed-over jagged edges of Radiohead's OK Computer.

Toal said the band wanted something closer to a live sound with View of an Orbiting Man, and certainly the album's songs would be easier to re-create live than Red Baby's. But there's nothing about the new album that could be called raw; it feels labored and obsessed over, but rather than feeling calculated, it sounds loved.

The album quiets down with "Kiss of Millions," but even that is dominated sonically by its lead guitar and horn lines. The title track revisits the minor-key dread of "Love Sick," with machine gun bursts of bass and drum and a droning, weeping guitar

The aptly named "Adrift, Imperfectly" sounds like a folk-festival jam, and it almost serves as an intermission before the second set.

The record's only misstep is the wildly out-of-place guitar wank on "You"; Tenki's too smart to indulge in guitar heroics, and because there's not a trace of irony on the record, it can't be a joke, either. It just sounds wrong.

We'll allow the band its mulligan, though, because its second album is otherwise fantastic - with finely crafted songs that are always compelling and full of sonic surprises.

Toal is happy with it, too, but having spent a year with the material for View of an Orbiting Man - including regular revisions to his lyrics ("The only good writing is re-writing," he said) - there's an element of exhaustion. Because the material on the album is so personal, Toal sounds as if he'd prefer to clam up. "I don't want to talk about this shit anymore," he said good-naturedly. "The next album's going to be political. Next one's about the country."

Unlike Red Baby, Toal expects that View of an Orbiting Man will hold up well. "I can live with this for a long time," he said.

And the material gets re-awakened for him in live performance. "When we're all hitting it live, it's the greatest feeling in the world," he said.

Tenki will perform Saturday from 9:30 to 11:30 p.m. at the Quad Cities Brew & View in The District of Rock Island. The band will also participate in a Future Appletree showcase on December 6 at RIBCO. For more information on the band, visit (http://www.tenkimusic.com).

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