Chad Clark didn't go to the Fort Reno music festival in D.C. in the summer of 2002 to recruit for his band. But then he met Rachel Burke there, and things started to change. A recent transplant to D.C. from Seattle, Burke professed her love of said band, Beauty Pill. They had released a spectacular debut EP the year before, The Cigarette Girl From the Future, that contained a sound most indie rockers couldn't even begin to realize.

But Clark's eagerness to make Beauty Pill a touring outfit began to rub with other band personnel's schedules. Consequently, members Abram Goodrich and Joanne Gholl departed, reducing the group to Clark (guitars, vocals, treatments) and drummer Ryan Nelson, who had joined after Cigarette Girl was already recorded.

Clark explained the band's current limbo to Burke as Fugazi raged onstage; she shyly revealed that she was a singer. The next day, Clark brought Burke to his studio, Inner Ear. He sat down with an acoustic guitar and taught her a song called "Lifeguard in Wintertime." "I put a microphone in front of her face," he recalls. "And the very first notes I ever heard Rachel sing are what you hear" on the track on the band's new record, their first full-length, The Unsustainable Lifestyle (Dischord).

"It was perfect, she completely understood. She was really interested in the meaning of the songs and talking about what the point of Beauty Pill was."

To understand the point of Beauty Pill, start with Smart Went Crazy, Clark's previous band. Working clearly in the Dischord/D.C. post-hardcore mold, Smart Went Crazy abetted their sound with cello and lacerating, doomed-relationship lyrics. Following their breakup in 1998, however, Clark was ready for something even more different.

"I've been cultured in the D.C. punk community; there's a kind of traditional, serrated, pushing energy to a lot of the great music that's come out of that," he explains. "I wanted to go the other way and actually do something that had some kind of Pied Piper quality to it that would draw people in and cast a spell."

A specific sound began to gestate when Clark went to see New York avant-jazz guitarist Marc Ribot speak at a seminar. "Every sound is a signifier," he recalls Ribot demonstrating. "I got really into that idea. [Ribot] articulated something I felt. So Abram and I, we started getting this sound in mind. Every idea that we came up with, we would start to design sounds around it. It expressed what the song was about, and every sound had to be there for a reason, and actually had to have an actual idea behind it. It's almost like a treatise, like you'd have to defend why you're using it."

On The Cigarette Girl From the Future, the jagged guitar lines and urgent rhythms are processed and treated to help create a sound at once funky and beautiful, recalling hip- and trip-hop, dub and psychedelia. The music is surreal yet vivid, like a misshapen, looking-glass dream. Clark penned lyrics like: "Mostly it's the feeling of moving into a house where the last tenant was a suicide and the landlord looks at you nervously."

Part of why the Beauty Pill history has moved in fits and starts is Clark's day job running Inner Ear and working as a producer/engineer for the likes of Fugazi, the Dismemberment Plan and Burning Airlines. Soon after meeting Burke, Clark found two musicians, bassist Basla Andolsun and guitarist Drew Doucette -- members of other bands he'd recorded. So, although it'd still be some time before another release -- a second EP, You Are Right to Be Afraid crept out quietly in early '03 -- Beauty Pill was a band again. (They're currently on tour, though, sadly, no Philly date.)

With The Unsustainable Lifestyle, released last month, one can finally get a sense of where this band is headed. There's less electronic manipulation, and it does feel like more of a band album. The guitars push and pull, propelled by Nelson's swinging rhythms.

In some ways, the album backs off the experimental promise of Cigarette Girl. Nevertheless, some of the very best songs show a band headed in intriguing new directions. "Won't You Be Mine" incorporates a jazzy sample from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, giving way to a trenchant commentary from Clark on race relations. Two other tracks, "Quote Devout Unquote" and "I'm Just Gonna Close My Eyes for a Second," gain transcendence through the disquieting mix of the band's simmering interplay and Burke's calm delivery of lyrics like, "Entreaties, invective: forget it/God loves a graceful exit."

"Especially in indie rock," Clark says, some people "couch being hack, shitty writers with no actual guts or point of view in abstraction. É I'm actually interested in people feeling that the songs have a trajectory; [that] they're going some place, you can recognize where they're going and where they're coming from. And hopefully they have enough mystery and power that they're open-ended and open to interpretation."