"It's a familiar sound/ We're under attack!" is Matt LeMay's call to arms. The "fighting back" he describes in Arms Down opener "2x2" could very well mean a battle he wants to declare on 2007 - the 2007 humming along to "Umbrella," in a Starbucks, the 2007 that's forgotten the skronk and squeal of Archers of Loaf and Chavez in favor of Joanna Newsom's stuffed-animal harp operas. And as a music journalist with a taste for the alternative-ignited '90s, can you blame him?

LeMay wants to bring the catchy and the weird back simultaneously, and who doesn't want to be on board for that (assuming you miss Archers of Loaf that is)?. So he's assembled a pretty good front line: Beirut's Zach Condon and John Natchez both sounding a horn chart punchier than any of their own records, the Wrens' Charles Bissell and Broken Social Scene's Chris Brown watching their backs with more guerrilla 12-string guitar and Hammond organ buried in the mix respectively, and none other than Jason Cadell of the legendary Dismemberment Plan commandeering the whole thing onto the battlefield.

Pedigree aside, the Rhode Island five-piece rocks pretty good, too. There's nothing inaccessible about Get Him Eat Him; these days they seem almost friendlier than the increasingly prog-obsessed New Pornographers, whom their debut Geography Cones bit pretty tastily. More spread out over the map than Cones, Arms Down finds LeMay trying on various vocal personas with playful results: the two-minute "The Coronation Show" is a dead-on Joe Pernice impression, while the chorus of "Patronage" sounds like Ric Ocasek forcing Ted Leo at gunpoint to record a Cars song. Speaking of the Cars, "Exposure," is this band's catchiest cut yet. Led by deliciously "Friends of P,"-style stun-gun synths, it could've even been a legitimate college-radio hit when a band like Sugar was still considered to have MTV potential.

Musically, GHEH stays within a more polished version of the debut's power-pop-decorated-with-art-rock vein, with one detour ("Push and Pull") into the kind of whiplash stop-and-go that Cadell's old band perfected, only with more of a desperate anthem feel that fans of Thunderbirds Are Now! will relish. LeMay's twisty structures and traffic-light song pacing leave little room for lyrical analysis, though after a few listens, scattered phrases emerge that suggest he's pretty heated about winning this good vs. evil thing: "I stumbled across the same crooked mile," "You shot me up," "You get it just to give it up."

Whatever the bloody result, Get Him Eat Him are eventually going to fulfill either a perfect pop cycle like the New Pornographers' Electric Version, or a nervous breakdown like Thunderbirds Are Now!'s Make History. But don't expect them to settle for just one or the other; it's more fun if they don't choose. Arms Down is their second straight record to absorb, absorb, absorb, sponging up all the sounds past and present that they need in their weaponry to achieve such a feat. While that development sometimes rewards the casual listener on a march like "2x2" or a bullet train like "Push and Pull," they're only on the brink of sustaining that power for forty minutes.