When Jay Blumenfield and Tim Quirk first entered the studio in December 2000 as Wonderlick, their only desire was to have a little fun. They'd been making music together since they were high school students, and had both recorded for indie and major labels as TOO MUCH JOY previously, but this time around they agreed in advance to release their work for free through a web site called the Susquehanna Hat Company.

Wonderlick's debut LP is an accidental concept album. Recorded on and off over the course of a year, most of its songs were written on the spur of the moment with no plans for an official commercial release. But for some reason they cohere, circling around the same lyrical themes and musical ideas, telling a story of family and mortality despite themselves.

"That turned out to be key," Quirk explains. Knowing we were going to give the music away was incredibly liberating, and oddly like being a teenager again - our only goal was to please ourselves. "

That initial session produced an early version of "I Disappear" - and the urge to do more. Wonderlick set a goal of recording one new song per month throughout 2001, releasing all of them as free downloads. Funded largely by fan donations, they got together as often as possible, playing most of the instruments themselves, but calling on friends and acquaintances as the mood struck: Steve Michener (Big Dipper) and Penn Jillette contributed some bass parts, Wendy Allen (The Court and Spark) lent some background vocals, and a mysterious figure called Seofon provided some of the drum loops.

The results surprised the band. "Every new song made me want to hear the next one, " Blumenfield says. "We stopped writing anything in advance, and just built songs from the ground up." This approach led them to focus as much on rhythm and mood as they did on melody. "Basically, we just tried to make each song as beautiful as possible."

By August, both members agreed that the songs they had so far sounded as though they belonged together on an album. The tunes are curiously unified by the band's try-anything approach: heavily-effected vocals wobble while symphonies of backwards instruments chime, and the oddest noises - from the hoot of an owl to a child's cry for her mother - get turned into music atop subtle but insistent grooves.

Against this backdrop, the push and pull of family bonds are explored from various perspectives (Donner Lake, How Small You Are, Two Women) while love both sacred and profane is celebrated -- and, sometimes, lamented (Chapel of Bones, I Want to Love You, The Right Crazy). In this context, the band's sparse, acoustic (yet strangely lush) re-working of Love Will Tear Us Apart sounds wholly their own.

In Wonderlick's world, anything can be a hook, whether it's a bass fill or the disbelieving refrain, "we're all gonna die." Indeed, that grim realization infects even the most joyous songs on the disc, lending a sense of consequence to each stray bit that gets stuck in your head. The band's mission seems to be writing songs that can lift you up even while carrying such a heavy load.