You're a clever scribe. Clue your readers into those sexual and cultural metaphors behind The Descent whydonchoo? But while you're at it, strip away the layers of political and social importance that make Chris Anderson's The Long Tail crucial.

Not to sound like David Mamet, but we're simply not content to let the thing be solely the thing. There are too few Snakes on a Planes — cultural artifacts that are exactly what they are. Cigars that are just cigars.

Take Daughters.

Is Daughters hardcore? Nah.

Grindcore? Nope.

The Rhode Island quintet has, since 2001, been notorious for a fast, loud spazcore roar that makes Isis and sunnO))) sound like Belle & Sebastian. (But take note: Members of Isis are in Red Sparowes, also on the Daughters bill this weekend at First Unitarian Church. Their new Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun is heavy, dense and chilling.)

THE LONG TALE: Hell Songs is more complex than Daughters' track-a-minute debut.

Fans of Daughters' first album, Canada Songs, and the live gigs that followed it can attest to this band's hasty rage. They savagely scream and shred through 20 songs in 20 minutes.

The new Hell Songs (Hydrahead) is a deeper, darker beast, the band's brazen borders now stretched to accommodate complex timing, instrumental weight, beautifully brutal singing and lyrics telling tales of gods and monsters. This is a progression worthy of dissection what with the addition of horns (on "Providence by Gaslight") and elongated compositions ("Cheers, Pricks").

Brass is important. Long songs are important.

From spastic-colon shouts to their thrashing disregard for time signatures, Daughters appear to be followers of a deeper cultural abstraction, namely the No Wave scene of downtown Manhattan's late 1970s. I'm hearing DNA, Mars and Teenage Jesus, whose songs were brusque and whose memberships included such innovative American artists as Arto Lindsay and Lydia Lunch.

"Never heard of them," says Daughters singer Alexis "Lex" Marshall, matter-of-factly, driving from Detroit to Buffalo.

"We just sat down and wrote this stuff, saw who had what and what guy had what."

Hmm.

There's not a lot that inspires Marshall other than maybe the art-rage of Birthday Party, whose "Marry Me (Lie! Lie!)" Daughters covered for the Release the Bats compilation. Maybe Nick Cave, whom Marshall channels vocally and lyrically when crustily crooning on Hell Songs' "Daughters Spelled Wrong."

"I'm not a big fan of Birthday Party. They're a great band. But they're not that great. And I'm not trying to sound like Nick Cave."

Despite the band's newly found complexity — one that hints at Daughters' growth as friends and maturity as players — there is no history behind how they met or what rituals they went through together to get there. "Some I've known since I was 16, others I can't remember," says Marshall of his bandmates. "I think it may be one of the guys' birthdays today."

He guesses his audience is mostly weird young women and a handful of odd musical peers, like Some Girls and Doomriders, with whom Daughters have toured. "We bond on the fact that most people are idiots and don't really appreciate what we're doing."

Call his sound spazzy yet precise — despite its off-putting rhythmic jolts — and Marshall is blasé. "Who gives a shit about people who just play music fast? Or the people who want to hear it?"

He sang hastily and messily on the first album and pretty much admits that songs like "Pants, Meet Shit," and " I Don't Give a Shit About Wood, I'm Not a Chemist" lacked subtext.

"The first record was stupid, a real piece of shit. If it came out now, I'd be embarrassed."

Well, it's just this blunt primal thing filled with blunt primal urges.

"Blunt. Right. That's the problem. It's fucking terrible."

It would be bullshit to say that Daughters just stumbled onto the changes that occurred on Hell Songs. I know because Marshall says it would be bullshit.

Then again, Daughters just got bored playing songs that were short, songs that were over before they began, so they made longer ones.

Marshall didn't want to scream viciously over savagely grotesque grind-paeans that meant nothing. "So I wrote some lyrics about things I gave a shit about, words I could read out of context."

"I don't know if I'd call them obsessions or concerns," he says. "I know there's a lot about religion, sex and fire on the record. You gotta write about something."

Give the man a cigar.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)