MASQUE, THE GATHERING: "We wanted to have a band that combined chaos with complexity," says singer Lynnette Shelley.

[ rock ]

After a decade as Philadelphia's go-to progressive art rock ensemble, The Red Masque is having its most incendiary year. Surrounding married mates Brandon Lord Ross and Lynnette Shelley are some fired-up new players. Their sound is ferocious, leaner and meaner.

Yet nothing put a flame under the quartet's ass like its last gig, in March 2011. That was the one at Hoi Polloi Studios, canceled by a four-alarm fire nearby. Not even the worst part. While the band was meeting at a diner several blocks away from the blaze, their car's windows got smashed. Duffel bags of vintage equipment, including a Morley Fuzz Wah and an echo Theremin, were stolen. So was Shelley's notebook with lyrics for a bunch of new songs she didn't have written anywhere else.

"No, nothing positive came of it," she says dryly when asked to look for a silver lining. "I think it would be fair to say that evening was the worst gig ever, if it can even be called a gig in that we weren't even able to play."

The Red Masque had been through some muck in its time. The pair started its musical life in Delaware under the name Copperthrush. (Their first gig was at WWDB's 1998 Scrapplefest, held at the TLA.) Back then, Shelley and Ross struggled to accomplish the wild vision — inspired by King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator — when they started to play the quietly dark and complicated arrangements of The Red Masque. "We wanted to have a band that combined chaos with complexity," says Shelley. She's a clarion vocalist whose lower range is like a rich bassoon, whose high notes could shatter a windshield, whose lyrics touch deeply and oddly on mythology and Celtic folklore.

It didn't help that she and Ross had issues with wannabe band members who would disappear without notice, had little time to devote to the cause or just didn't get the idea behind The Red Masque's terrapin score.

"Brandon and I were very close to calling it quits. We just didn't see how we were going to be able to move forward."

The solution came from a brief pre-2010 hiatus, one Craigslist ad and a desire to streamline their schizoid sound into something less grand. The pair wanted to make a brand of noir art metal that was more intimately intertwining yet blunter than their previous sound. They also wanted to be able to share such studio-centric frippery with live audiences.

"I no longer worry that we won't be able to pull off our live sound," says Shelley of the new union that's been together since fall of 2010. Red Masque Mach 3 includes guitarist Nicholas Giannetti and drummer Steve Craig.

"We were moving in this direction before Nicholas joined," says Shelley. "The newer material that Brandon and I were writing was more aggressive at times than anything in our past. That said, Nicholas is probably the most technically skilled guitarist we've had. That's not a slight to anybody who played with us before. Brandon is not your average bass player and most of the songs are structured around his bass lines."

What this translates to is that the sharp shards of The Red Masque's new crunch sounds closer to the band's mangy first EP ( Death of the Red Masque, 2001) than to their last opulent CD ( Fossil Eyes, 2008). "That EP had a kind of garage prog sound to it, dirty, DIY and adventurous," says Shelley.

The discordant roar of their past is now made bolder and more brusque for the present. That suits Shelley's new songs, like "The Dark Salt Sea" (eerily prescient of the disaster in Japan), just fine. Other new songs about Minotaurs and Saturn follow suit. "The new music is very intense, cathartic and transporting," says Shelley. "It makes perfect sense for what I'm writing now."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

The Red Masque plays Sun., May 1, 8 p.m., $10, with Moraine and K2, The Fire, 412 W. Girard Ave., 267-671-9298, iourecords.com/thefire.