If you wandered into the Cotton Jones show at Spaceland on Thursday before having previewed their music, you might mistake them for the ghost of a country-western band in the haunted saloon of some Gold Rush town. This impression is very different from the one made by their latest album, Paranoid Cocoon, which reads something like the Velvet Underground or Surrealistic Pillow-era Jefferson Airplane, and has been compared more than once to Yo La Tengo’s album And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out.

Paranoid Cocoon seems to announce itself as a rock and roll album, opening with “Up a Tree (Went This Heart I Have),” a tune that pairs frontman Michael Nau’s throaty vocals over a thick, bluesy baseline. Quickly, though, the song itself, and then the whole album, gradually evolves into something different, whirring off into turrets of ambient, kaleidoscopic sound. In “Up a Tree,” the tension between the tight, rhythmic, rock and roll sound, and a diffuse trippiness is engaging. Throughout the album, the band often discards and then returns to this tension in favor of long ambles down psychedelic pathways lined with brushed percussion, prolonged leans into an organ, and synthetic keyboard sounds.

The Cotton Jones live experience was quite different, probably because the band found it difficult to match the plush reverberation that is achievable with a studio set-up. Songs like “Blood Red Sentimental Blues” were only tweaked slightly, but the difference was remarkable. Without the echo chamber quality of the studio, Michael Nau and Whitney’s McGraw’s contrasting vocals (he a husky Jim Morrison, she the delicate siren of a 1950’s radio program) rang clear and true, allowing pretty turns of phrase—like “I heard it in the garbage can, in every piece of trash, you better color up my heart again, I’m afraid it’s turning black”—their due.

In concert, songs like “Cotton and Velvet” and “Gotta Cheer Up” also sharpened their melancholy. On album, “Cotton and Velvet” is the auditory equivalent of a heroin high, a feeling not discouraged by its title, or by beautiful, non-sequitur lyrics like “my tongue on the ocean, made me feel all numb” and “the poet barks.” In concert, however, you might actually be inclined to question Nau’s statement that “there was no sadness, and nothing was wrong.” The mournful call of a steel guitar was more distinguishably audible, and the feeling of being stranded alone inside your own desert more distilled.

One highlight was an expanded version of “Some Strange Rain,” simply announced by Nau as “a love song.” Like many other Cotton Jones songs, it substitutes its own unique narrative structure for the traditional verse/chorus/bridge. In the case of “Some Strange Rain,” the progression through long instrumental sections, alternating with free-form verse, what sounds like but never turns out to be a harmonied chorus, and a solo guitar bridge, gives one the feeling of several songs cobbled together. It’s an apt sentiment for a song whose lyrics travel the long distance of a relationship, from “I got me standing in the rain, well here we go again,” to what sounds to be a shot-gun wedding at the end of the song, with the intriguing, “Come yesterday, I had no love for cats, I had no words for cats, but I love Kat,” sandwiched somewhere in the middle. The piecemeal song had all logic of love itself, but also all of the charm.

The concert version of “Some Strange Rain” encapsulated everything both exciting and frustrating about Cotton Jones’ style. Their willingness to wander down new musical avenues, peeking into any door that catches their interest, means the sacrifice of an integrated form in favor of a playfulness that is sometimes meandering. It’s a worthy trade-off, and one that leaves space for the fresh promise of innovation in Cotton Jones’ future work.

—Tara Everhart