You can tell a lot about a band from its official bio. Sometimes more than you might have wished. “The Fantastic Ooze are prepared for battle, leading an army of disgruntled and disillusioned music fans on a quest to rescue contemporary music from the doldrums of reality.” Hmm. Although they’re tongue-in-cheek about it to a degree—they go on to name-check Mothra and quote LL Cool J—this local trio clearly thinks of itself as outside the mainstream. But that doesn’t necessarily make them a viable alternative.

This EP features five songs whose pretenses, as you might guess from the above, don’t quite sync up with their true strengths. There’s something going on in the morass of Eighties indie-psych moves that are the bookends “Sea Monkeys (The new batch)” and “Magic Mary,” but the monochromatic production makes it hard to tell just what. These guys do with echo what some folks do with ketchup, and it obscures the real pop aesthetic at work in the title track and “Octastic (baby),” both of which mix garage crunch with snotty glam. When the riffs and hooks break free of their surroundings, these guys sound capable of growing into a solid indie force in the mode of Spoon or the Starlight Mints—but they won’t get there without focus. Less sonic ooze, in this case, equals more fantastic.