By Matt DeMarco, Staff Writer

The entire premise of music is changing. Genres of music that were once so easily defined and identified have now meshed with other genres to create subgenres, alternate genres, genres that don’t necessarily exist yet, etc. Under one of these unnamed genres, you’ll find the Disco Biscuits.

The Disco Biscuits are an electronic rock band who pride themselves on adding elements of rock into their music to create electronic music that you can actually sing to — melodic electronic music. The concept, until now, was next to non-existent. This stuff is nothing like that of Edgard Varése, the “Father of Electronic Music,” who used bells, whistles, and “prepared” pianos to create his eerie, electronic sound. The Disco Biscuits have created electronic music that you can actually sing along to, stuff that you can hum the melody to. They’ve bridged the gap between rock and electronic music, and the results are unparalleled and impressive.

With a name like “the Disco Biscuits,” it’s safe to assume the worst. Let’s be serious here — many bands give themselves ridiculous names with hopes of bringing enough attention to themselves to attract people to buy their albums, only to disappoint when it comes to the actual content (Can we say “Dr. Acula?”). I was not expecting to hear anything worth writing about when I first popped in the CD, but  found myself quite pleasantly surprised.

Their new album, “Planet Anthem,” was unpredictable; not one song sounded even remotely similar. If you’d told me that this was a playlist entitled “Completely Random Songs” on someone’s iPod, I would’ve believed you. One song had a hip-hop feel, the next- rock, then rap; they used such an eclectic mix of styles and techniques, yet they stayed true to themselves by providing an underlying electronica feel behind each song.

The rock-esque songs were the most successful on the album. “Big Wrecking Ball” offers a fun, simple chant-like chorus — almost like the All-American Rejects’ “Gives You Hell” — followed by an impressive guitar solo. “Loose Change” has a cool, simple opening riff, but it grabs your attention. It ends up being more electronic than rock, but it’s still pretty catchy and makes for easy listening.

The best track on the album, however, is “On Time.” It’s purely electronic, and is just flat-out fun. There’s no question that it’s a dance track — the listener is inspired to get up and move after just hearing the first chorus. The song has a brief break in the middle that features an interesting solo that fuses a synthesizer with an electric guitar. It’s a good song — so much so that I was left wanting more; at 3:35, it’s one of the shortest songs on the record, and while some of the others tended to drag on after a while, this one ended kind of abruptly. I wouldn’t have minded another 30 seconds to a minute more.

A minor thing that I found irritating was how there were really no vocal challenges on the album. Granted, it’s primarily an electronic album, and electronic music focuses mostly on the beats and effects of each song, but I still feel that using more vocal technique could have brought a level of depth to the album that it seemed to be missing.

That aside, the Disco Biscuits really have a winner here. This album serves as a reminder to never judge a book by its cover, no matter how strange and obscure that cover may be.

Cover art of the album “Planet Anthem” ( discobiscuits.net)