New York City musician David First doesn't typically futz around with pop music. He's a restlessly creative avant garde guitarist whose forthcoming projects include a dance remix of elephant sounds and an album that combines noise rock with brainwave manipulation. In the '70s he was a member of the Notekillers, an experimental rock group that Thurston Moore cites as an influence on Sonic Youth. Universary is his first full-length foray into pop music, but it's not a complete departure from his previous work. At first listen, the album sounds like straightforward electro-pop with a bit of an edge -- the Lightning Seeds crossed with Another Green World-era Brian Eno, maybe. But listen closer and hear a welter of weirdness in every song -- incessant beeps, barely-perceptible squeaks and squiggles and attenuated tones. Spend some time with the album and it proves both catchy and, in its understated way, challenging.

First gets things started with an electronic beep that sounds like an EKG machine. The beep speeds up and slows down and finally gives way to "When the Blue Sky Divides", a mid-tempo song with well-written lyrics about facing the future. The vocals don't kick in for nearly two-and-a-half minutes, but when they do they're a pleasant surprise -- First's voice is warm and his cadences are deliberate and soothing. The next song, "All I Ask", ratchets up the BPM several notches with an amphetamine-fast drum machine beat. Shelley Hirsch adds some Diamanda Galàs-style background warbling as First clutters his canvas with crazy swirls of theremin and electronica.

The chaos dies down on "Baby Destiny", the disc's melodic highlight, which sounds like a really good Lightning Seeds song; its touches of trumpet and oboe and numinous backing vocals elevate it to a level of pop heaven rarely attained elsewhere on Universary. The mood shifts for "Zoom", a brooding, slightly sinister techno-pop song in the vein of Depeche Mode. "The Ladder" opens with a swarm of asynchronous repetitive sounds, before a beat and a cool sitar hook (believe it or not) confer some illusory order. The sitar, played by Shyam Yodh, meets a clarinet and a powerful drone en route to "Another Passenger", the song with the fiercest beat on the album. It also might have the most compelling lyrics -- First gets about as worked up as his equanimous voice will allow, singing, "Midnight in the Re-painted Zone... misspell all the passwords here."

"Heaven Circus" is the one track in which pretension seems to overwhelm pop. First weighs in on political matters in language of Nostradamus-like inscrutability; verses like "Meanwhile provoked sides conduct furtive mutual strikes in the sand, a madness that spills fire over the hopeless to stop them" make you wish the soapbox would collapse. The melody is bombastic, giving the song a Styxish bad rock opera feel. But First recovers in fine style with "Enough", a gorgeous ballad reminiscent of Robyn Hitchcock. When a drum machine and synthesizers take over for acoustic guitar and strings about three minutes into the song, it's enough to give you goosebumps.

Like Brian Eno, First seems to find experimental music projects of varying levels of inaccessibility more compelling than pop, even though, also like Eno, he excels at the latter. Songs like "Enough" and "Baby Destiny" make one hope he'll find the time and inspiration to revisit more immediately satisfying, song-based music.