Cat power Trouble Books' Lejsovka and Freund enjoy their form of rehearsal.

If Akron's Trouble Books have one shortcoming, it's that they create music solely for daydreamers and people who spend significant stretches of their day lost in thought. It takes a certain type of person to appreciate the band's music. You can usually spot them by their wide eyes, their shuffling feet, their faded Converse sneakers with the rubber soles falling off, or their appreciation for over-the-top knitwear. They're, in a word, idiosyncratic.

Trouble Books haven't made a lot of music you can dance to, or even music you can wash dishes to. They usually make music for people who don't mind losing 45 minutes of their day to stretching out on the carpet and digesting an entire album. It's music that's both ambient and intimate and requires your full attention. But with their new album, The United Colors of Trouble Books, Trouble Books can break through to a broader audience. They're even making songs that are, dare we say it, single-worthy, all without compromising their original sound.

Trouble Books, comprising Keith Freund, girlfriend Linda Lejsovka, Mike Tolan and a rotating cast of friends, began on a whim and have spent the last few years adhering to a strict philosophy of musical laissez-faire.

"It seemed like a fun idea to play a show in the kitchen at the now defunct Diamond Shiners house in Akron a couple years ago, and it's continued to be fun to record and play shows so far," says Freund. Freund and Lejsovka are the core of Trouble Books, but while they share an apartment, they limit their creative endeavors at home to making giant stuffed monsters and fiddling with field recordings.

"We almost never actually play music," says Freund. "There's never been a Trouble Books jam and practices are few and far between."

"More likely I'm upstairs sewing or throwing my sewing machine into the street, and Keith is lying around bothering the cats," adds Lejsovka.

The ingredients to a Trouble Books song are as follows: "$40 microphone, cassette eight-track for recording."

"I like making delays and echoes trip over themselves and speeding up and slowing down samples," Freund says. "The production is the first thing I think of when I start writing a song. It goes something like "Okay, let's have a bed of warble-y guitar swells, and backwards cymbals, and maybe some clarinet.' Then lyrics and melodies come later."

Trouble Books' lyrics deal with topics ranging from small everyday crises (like leaving the space-heater on) to apocalyptic scenarios, all glossed over with laid-back harmonies that communicate a resolution to whatever comes their way, be it small house fires or the sun exploding. It's comforting really. It's also a perfect compliment to their elaborate orchestration, ambient fuzz and electronic distortion.

Most of the members of Trouble Books play in various other Akron/Cleveland area bands as well, most notably Talons, which is a restructured version of TB.

"Talons is Mike [Tolan's] writing and vision," Freund says. "And Trouble Books is mine. We could've been one grouchy band with two songwriters maybe, but then it all would've regressed into some sort of "two dude apes in a small zoo'-like scenario. Now, we're a couple of silverbacks with our own crap to throw and separate treehouses to throw it from."

While they maintain their separate band and, er, "crap" boundaries, Talons is the yin to Trouble Books' yang. With a Talons release lined up for April, it seems fitting that the two bands should always come as a package deal (if not a package bill). And now, Trouble Books has become a priority. Last summer, Freund spent three months on tour with Six Parts Seven and then topped that off with a month in France and Germany with Lejsovka. When the pair returned, the band regrouped.

"I felt like there was no point in making music unless you were doing something new and unique," Freund says. "We'd all really gotten into ambient and drone music, and Trouble Books had hinted at those sorts of things before, but this time I really wanted to marry our singing with the ambient hums and roars. All of the best genres are like that."

While their previous efforts have been just as engrossing, on The United Colors of Trouble Books, the band has amped up its production values and paired its usual fuzzy, seven-minute bliss-outs with stronger melodies and louder, more lucid vocals and lyrics. Songs like "Shaky Science" and "CFHC (Cuyahoga Falls Hardcore)" seem primed for college radio. It's obvious that, despite their casual approach to being in a band, their musical aesthetic is rock solid. As Freund attests, on this album, "We tried harder."

Trouble Books, Apes
9 p.m. Friday, March 21
Musica
21 North Maiden Ln., Akron
Tickets: $6