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“We’ve had several people tell us ‘I don’t usually like this kind of stuff, but I really enjoyed watching you guys play.’ Which puzzles me, cuz I’m not sure what ‘kind of stuff’ we are,” explains Randy Faucheux III, guitarist/vocalist/percussionist for experimental rock outfit Wilderness Pangs.

Faucheux is the music director for campus radio station KLSU, so when you ask who the band’s influences are, you get an encyclopedic response. “I’d say stuff like the Beach Boys, Prince, OutKast, Merzbow, Captain Beefheart, Pussy Galore. Honestly, I could go on and on. We’re all such huge music fans, and really, we’re open to letting just about anything influence what we do, so long as it works within the context of what we’re doing.”

Multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Baptiste’s response is a little more direct.

“For me, it all started with Prince. He always yelled and made really odd songs and found a way to make it rock and freak at the same time,” Baptiste says.

Whatever ingredients go into the group, the outcome is always surprising. One minute they’re working an electro grove on some dodgy keyboards, the next moment they’re raging away over some caveman guitar riff. “I kind of like it to feel like we’re always about to fall apart,” says Faucheux. “And if we’re successful, we never actually will fall apart.”

But it doesn’t fly for everyone. One local musician sought the band out on its MySpace page to describe Wilderness Pangs as “what real musicians are forced to listen to in hell.” But the band is comfortable with not fitting in too well. “We actually all appreciated that one way more than we were offended by it,” says Faucheux. “That’s so much cooler than just being the kind of band that bores people to the point of apathy.”

The band has been laboring away on its first full-length release, recorded at local mainstay studio Apocalypse the Apocalypse. They pooled their myriad of styles to create a greater vision. “Elephant Ghost” is a hazy, homey number where sunburned guitars give way to handclaps and nightmare flashbacks. “Stolen Logic” mines an almost underground hip-hop terrain, with the vocals spoken over a minimalist synthesizer beat. “Roundabout Way” is an infectious fuzz-guitar and racket punky number that reminds one of the more pop moments on early Sonic Youth albums.

“I think we’re more pop than we are rock,” says Faucheux. “For me, the difference between rock and pop is the focus on rhythm or melody. Rock is rhythm; pop is melody. And melody is definitely extremely important in what we do.”

The country-ish, acoustic-guitar based “Shot My Favorite Horse” would not be out of place on a mid-career Stones or Neil Young album, with a lonely slide guitar snaking around the melody. “Wolfman (Lite)” pits a plaintive psychedelic ballad against a percolating wall of noises. All these different sides to the band culminate on the 8-minute “Ms. Smith” where electronic drones form like clouds over a plaintive, almost somnambulistic pop daydream. The album is multifaceted and touches on a lot of different styles without compromising the underlying restless exploratory thread of the band.

myspace.com/wildernesspangs