Nebraskan intensity

By TONI BARTONE

Her Flyaway Manner

With The Lot Six, Life in Bed, Clairvoyance

Tonight, 7 p.m.

Mr. Roboto… Her Flyaway Manner

With The Lot Six, Life in Bed, Clairvoyance

Tonight, 7 p.m.

Mr. Roboto Project, $5, all ages

722 Wood St., Wilkinsburg

www.therobotoproject.org

Borrowing from Fugazi and Husker Du, among other punk greats, Her Flyaway Manner will sound familiar yet will also carve out its own niche tonight at Roboto.

A post-hardcore four-piece from Lincoln, Neb., Her Flyaway Manner formed as a trio in 1996 and released a self-titled, full-length album in 2000 on Caulfield Records. The band followed this release with the tighter and more feverishly energetic five-song EP in 2001, A Rotation of Thoughts and Themes. This most recent recording possesses the hit-and-run quality that a proper EP should have, crashing through the listener’s head, leaving him or her longing for more as it plays through in less than 30 minutes, and hinting at the band’s even more energetic live presence.

The EP opens with the title track; the first lyric is “repetition gets in the way,” which sums up the rest of the band’s style. Her Flyaway Manner experiments with tempos and vocal conventions, even formulating its own version of syncopated jazz percussion at times and adding flights of noise, along with alternating between shouting and speaking the lyrics.

Lyrically, Her Flyaway Manner is simple and direct, expressing emotion without whining. The band dares to endure the “emo” label with lyrics such as “Watching time pass by, I reach for you, and you move away, I guess I just came to say I can’t find the kiss of indigo,” yet somehow pulls off such musings with heavy and dense instrumentation.

See Her Flyaway Manner, The Lot Six, Life in Bed and Clairvoyance if you feel like lamenting relationships and rocking at the same time.