Indie-pop is often best at its most eclectic. Saturday We're Even goes from excellent video game score to offbeat Broadway soundtrack, to loose country groove, to campfire song, to sludge, to loose, jovial pop-rock. The unifying element in this hodge-podge of stylistic pastiche and homage is a gleeful willingness to be a little strange, a little geeky and a lot smart. It was a real shock to learn that the band only had three members -- it's a rare, rare thing to find three people who can work together with this much range, creating such a big sound with so many nuances, all in a very indie little sound-space. Think of it as discovering a young They Might Be Giants, except there are half again as many official members and only a third of them are named John.

When I first wrote this review earlier this year, Pro Audio's site said they were going to play one last show, and then they would break up. I quickly fired off a supportive e-mail to the band requesting that they please try to keep it together. I also closed the original version of this review with a paragraph pointedly requesting that readers give Pro Audio a chance. "Buy their album," it said. "E-mail them like I did," it said. Unfortunately, the review was never published. As happens from time to time at even the most well-administrated sites, some files got mixed up, e-mails were not sent and corrections were forgotten. The good news is this: Pro Audio didn't break up. They pulled through. We can correct our error, and, as a happy result, congratulate them on having pulled through.

So what was the appeal back then? It was a lot of things. Video game-styled opener "Born in a Pod" is about hating your life, but it's the indie-pop method of hating your life, so it's still fun. "Student Loans Prologue" and "Student Loans" follow. A sharp mix of earnest self expression and pointed humor, they tell the story of a slow, painful fiscal death by -- you guessed it -- student loan. The band makes the most of everything at their disposal: doo-wop backing vocals, Ryan Thompson's playful drums and a bouncy trumpet not only fill out Pro Audio's basic sound, they dominate the songs. The resulting pair of seemingly straightforward circa-1910 Broadway showtunes slyly tuck electric guitar into their seams, its metallic crunch the perfect sonic glue for their spacious arrangements. The songs' biting lyrics are equally obfuscated by John Fischer's earnest, downtrodden delivery. He confesses, "Sallie Mae makes me nervous / When I think about you and / I'm thinking about you all the time. / I had prospects / I had contacts / I had objects / Now all I have / Are student loans. / College was cool but, it burned every penny I had."

Closer "Child Prodigy... Evil Mastermind" strikes the same balance between humor and genuine, surprising emotional impact, combining sunny indie-pop guitars and moments of orchestrated introspection with the poor man's Broadway sensibility we encountered in "Student Loans". The song's epilogue ("Child Prodigy Epilogue"), which actually comes first for reasons of dramatic structure, is a soul-inflected campfire ditty. "You shouldn't have kicked me while I was down," the band-members sing. "You shouldn't have kicked me while I was down." This is the sort of attention to detail that makes Pro Audio such a lovable band -- in delineating the boy genius's narrative, they allow you first to perceive it in a sequence emphasizing its storytelling content -- but when you complete the second song and notice that the epilogue came before the actual story, the events rearrange themselves for you and logical cause becomes emotional explanation. The statement ,"You shouldn't have kicked me when I was down" is transformed from an excuse to an apology...or the next best thing to one.

Pro Audio was a great band. And luckily for us, half a year later, they still are. Hunt down a copy of Saturday We're Even and experience the other eight cool songs we didn't have time to discuss here. The band not only needs our continued support -- they absolutely deserve it.