BOSTON PHOENIX

Luminous: Reflecting Skin lighten up, Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano Reflecting Skin are the type of band that you'd love to avoid lumping into a category. They've got the emotive female singer up front, the shimmering guitar chords and the trance-inducing rhythms -- and at their Middle East release party last week, they had more than a few vampire-bitten types in the audience. So you make a note to avoid hauling out stock adjectives like ethereal, moody, or the band's least favorite, dark. "God, I hope we're not that," said guitarist Christian Gilbert as he ducked into Hi-Fi Pizza before the release party. "I hope people don't hear darkness; I hope they hear people doing something they really want to do." Adds bassist Alex Milne, "We're dark only in that we're introspective. And some people aren't always going to want to introspect." Concludes singer Leah Chandra, "We're on the lighter side of dark." In fact, Reflecting Skin are a good deal more interesting than that. Their CD Haley (on their own unnamed label) takes the textural soundscapes of Gilbert's earlier band Opium Den to a more abstract plane -- if it's dark, then so are a lot of seductive things. There's a bit of a Cure/Banshees undertone (specifically, the creative-peak albums that Siouxsie made when Robert Smith was a Banshee), and with a mix of world-music elements and rock backbeat, it's the sound of the Middle East meeting the Middle East. On stage the band often hide behind a movie screen, moving from cosmic suspensions into big chord crashes; meanwhile Chandra's vocals are alternately inviting and menacing. The disc doesn't catch the full range of their dynamics, but there's enough to keep you coming back. To hear them tell it, they were fated to get together. Gilbert, Milne, and drummer Dave McFarland were previously in One of Us, but their relations with John Eye, the band's theatrically inclined singer, were apparently none too smooth. Then Gilbert met Chandra at a party. "She managed to say she was looking for a guitar player, and I asked what kind," Gilbert recalls. "She said, `Someone pretty much like you.' I asked why she sang and she said, `Because I have to.' Then I said that was the right answer, and she said, `I know.' " ....Gilbert continues, "I'll tell you why I do music: it's because time is my enemy. Every piece of music says something about time. You can listen to a bird singing and know how that relates to the big picture -- that it will lead into something else and the circle will recur. So a song is a representation of that; it gives you a glimpse of the whole arrangement. My girlfriend paints, and I'm always asking why she wants to work with tubes of paint when there are all these vivid colors out there in nature. But a painting says something about space, just as a piece of music says something about time." Normally I'd be tempted to say something like, "And you thought it was just about catchy tunes." But of course, it doesn't always have to be.