If you'd spent days driving through hurricane counties along the Gulf Coast, you wouldn't think there'd be too much to laugh about. Houston, Austin, New Orleans and Baton Rouge are not comedy central right this minute. There's a Vile Bodies vibe to playing clubs in those bruised towns, and you can hear it in the voices of tourmates United States of Electronica and Kandy Whales. It conjures up words like "intense" and "scary" and "feverous" and "frenetic" from the band members, whether they're in the smoked-up sanctity of their troubled van or a slightly-more-comfortable Waffle House in Dallas, Texas. Nothing beats the sense of doom mixed with that hickory sausage smell.

"We keep waiting for someone to pull a knife on us," says Whales' singer/lyricist Clark Roth.

"I'm thankful to be in the midst of it than to be ravaged by it," says U.S.E. leader Noah Star Weaver.

Yet Kandy Whales' drummer Joshua Delpech-Ramey finds something giddy as soon as we start yakking about the connection between his dancetronic Philly band and its similarly groovy counterpart from Seattle.

All eight members of U.S.E. and the four-person core of Kandy Whales (not counting its raunchy, Philly area-born horns) hail from the Emerald City. Most of the boys in both bands were students of Evangelicalism who met and merried up at the religious theme park that was the Methodist-based Seattle Pacific University.

"The campus was all dry and nonsmoking," says Roth. A Nebraskan, he moved to Seattle to go to college and wrote goth-tinged piano-based songs with smart-ass lyrics about goat sacrifice and attacking-your-rich-aunt themes. The members mixed and matched across band lines out there before settling into their current units.

"Never ask a philosopher a question," laughs Delpech-Ramey — who just finished his graduate dissertation on modern epistemology and currently teaches philosophy at Villanova — after I inquire about the bands' holy-rolling origin story.

His chuckle? It's hearty. Lasts a long time. "We're playing together to answer that very question: What connects a bunch of divinity-based religious types playing the same sort of music? But that turns the cure into the symptom just by asking." He's still laughing. And I'm laughing. This is getting me nervous.

"The questions behind Evangelicalism are a sort of disease," he continues. "But you can't cure it directly. It's suicide. So we try indirectly, with the result being some pretty damn good danceable rock music."

There's a definite symmetry, a push and pull in this league of gentlemen. The Whales plummet you to hell while U.S.E. lift you to heaven.

"I've always felt an aura of destiny about these guys beyond music," says Delpech-Ramey. "Our parents would have built churches or become missionaries."

For U.S.E., heaven sounds like an unrobotic, unkitsch version of Daft Punk, one where big cheery guitars, four-on-the-floor discoid rhythms and sweetly sonorous girlie backgrounders mix with Weaver's vocoder-ized singing.

The whole religious studies thing was definitely part of U.S.E.'s genesis. "I wasn't going to let it overwhelm my life," says Weaver of his religious studies at Seattle Pacific University. "But it was pretty inescapable otherwise."

"We survived Christian college together and made it to the Temple of Rock alive," says Delpech-Ramey.

Regardless of whether that scholastic zeal has stuck with him the way it has for some of these apostles — several members of each band are religion teachers — it has created something elegantly uplifting on their debut album U.S.E. There's a spirituality in the vivacious sound, a brand of bouncing electro-rock that was honed during off-campus house parties. "And lyrically, there's love at the core, a sense of family, the mystery of life — it's all definitely a part of what we do," says Delpech-Ramey. That goes for the thwacking chant-anthem "IT IS ON!" and the up-with-people pop of "Open Your Eyes."

"I had been trying to do that sort of vivid electronic music on my own but didn't have the patience," says Roth of how he wound up in Whales. "They turned my songs into this electronic thing I had always wanted them to be."

But the sound was always closer to live music than something born of the studio. That was something Roth and Delpech-Ramey learned from their buddies in U.S.E., who had released the original version of their debut and toured feverishly before Kandy Whales got off the ground.

Roth's sense of lyrical pageantry and hallucinatory characterization led to Whales songs like "Monkey Drive," giving the techie danz-rawk of their debut, Blow Up!, a chatty complexity Talking Heads might've made during their beautiful wife/beautiful house best.

But unlike that first CD, there's a greater directness to the new, rubbery Melted Inside EP — a Spartan hardness, spaciousness and horniness that figures as much into its lyrics as does the music. "I think we spent all of 2005 thinking about directness, how to effect the sentiment of both the sound and the word," says Delpech-Ramey. "We're expanding the vocabulary of that same sentiment. But we want to clarify it too."

Now, Roth is talking less about mythical animals, ritualized spiritualized sex and occult themes and more about real human issues. If the issues are still lurid and still complex, so be it. "It's a matter of not distracting from the music, conforming to fit without compromising the ideas," says Roth. They've stripped words, not thought, from Melted Inside.

"For a guy that's lives inside his head … all the time … that's pretty hard," giggles Roth. "But you want to communicate accurately." This new meticulousness has helped the band battle the disconnect that occurred on Blow Up!, the one that stopped people from fully getting their groove on without having to think.

And thinking, at present, might not be what the crowds along the Gulf Coast need right now.

This is not about electronic party missionaries heading into the eye of the storm (pardon the pun) to conquer the gods and their illusive mysteries. According to Roth, there's a yearning for release here that he hopes their bands' mix of epiphany and sorrow can bring. "I think there's something about both of us that recognizes the shit — the horror, the troubles — and chooses to celebrate life. It flows through everything we do."

United States of Electronica and Kandy Whales play Sun., Oct. 9, 8 p.m., $10, with Helen Back and the Str8 Razors, North Star Bar, 2639 Poplar St., 215-684-0808, www.northstarbar.com.