There's something slightly off about Wasabi Devils, a Brooklyn based punk-garage foursome that pits assymmetric Lora Logic grooves against driving surf-punk twang and babelfishy lyrics. It's partly singer/co-writer Keiko Takano's foreign cadence and delivery that transforms lines like "your voice composes the music inside of me" from naive poetics to odd verbal conundrums. It's partly the way that Wasabi Devil's killer rhythm section -- Eric Neuser on drums and Pat Fondiller (Angels of Light, Devendra Banhart) on bass -- leaves space around its driving punk core, allowing room for Dan McAssey to truly fuck with the structure. The band sets down an idea -- say, the "Radar Love"-ish sped-up stomp that defines "I Met a Man Who Doesn't Clean Up" -- then looks for a way to completely confound it. The jittery jazz groove under "The Rest of the World" somehow mutates into twangy slashes, and "Amethyst"'s hypnotic shimmer erupts mid-song into a blinding wall of noise experiment. And yet wherever Wasabi Devils go, musically speaking, their attack is precise and well-targeted, a machine-tooled instrument of creative destruction.

The lyrics are good to excellent; Takano has included some of them in a book of poetry she sells on the band's web site. However, they seem more mysterious and profound than they are, I think, simply because they are uttered in a distinctive, non-native way. For example, the words to "The Rest of the World" handily capture a certain kind of alienation when they say "I'm smoking in the nothingness of quantum space / anyone else is a silhouette / walking by me / walking through me." Still, they're nowhere near as strange and elusive on the page as they are in Keiko's voice. She may remind you a little of Nico, especially in slower songs like "Dance" -- cool and untouchable and unfamiliar.

The album's title is a verbal trick that modestly manipulates the band's name, inserting spaces here and there to form a new and rather foreboding phrase. It's very similar to what the band does with standard formats like punk and garage, making slight, disturbing alterations that command your attention even as they set you on edge.