"The mystery is so much more interesting to the listener," enthuses Shackeltons front man Mark Redding. "You can sit in your room and the music is whatever you think it is. I love that!

"I really think that imagination is such a great gift that's given to us," he continues. "We should leave more room for the imagination. Less is more when it comes to that. I always wanted that to be a rule of thumb for our band. I didn't want people to know too much about us as individuals. I just want them to know our music. I just want them to imagine whatever they want to think about us as individuals."

For now, The Shackeltons are in a perfect spot to nurture the air of mysterious men of music. The band's debut, The Shackeltons won't be on shelves until the end of the month from Loveless Records. The five-piece toured outside its Chambersburg, Pa. hometown, but the self-released route of its first few EPs didn't have the push to bring too many new fans through the door. And while a select few media outlets, albeit ones like Seattle's KEXP radio, Spin and Rolling Stone who are a few rungs up from unknown-blogger hype, the band's still nearly anonymous anywhere out of the Northeast.

Of course, that low profile's going to get more and more difficult for The Shackeltons. If their debut is any indication, the act should be grooming itself to become the first punk and indie darlings of 2008. The band, which takes its name from Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, rifles though punk, post-punk, post-hardcore and rock with little worry how they'll fit together. Their formula works -- quite well -- though it doesn't do a whole lot to ingratiate the band to any of those styles' scenesters. Instead, it forges its own identity. Making passing allusions to everything from Fugazi's military-precise arrangements and The Pixies' penchant for noise-as-pop arrangements to The Murder City Devils' ear-splitting heartache and British Sea Power's uncanny ability to live at the edge of the deep end without falling over it. Coming straight out of nowhere, The Shackeltons packs a sucker-punch wallop for anyone not ready to deal with such an articulate, well developed voice as the band's. "Treasure Chest" opens the album with a prime example of the band's smoldering-to-explosive dynamics, as Redding's vocals swing between aching and ranting in a heartbeat. "Yellow Cadillac" is similarly explosive, as the band charges ahead like Fugazi packed full of badly cooked biker speed, while "Bloke," with it bass-heavy groove, seems to cannibalize and corrode everything from Jonathan Fire*Eater's sense of groove to modern art-punk's obsession with style. It's not the sort of debut that lends itself to anonymity all that well.

That's the sort of attention that any up-and-coming rocker would sell his grandma's soul to get, but it's going to pose a bit of a challenge to The Shackeltons' air of mystery.

The Thrill of the Unknown

At first glance, the fact that the band -- guitarists Eric Fisak and Dan Schuchman, bassist Justin McDaniel and drummer Sean Hallock -- packs into a room on a chilly December evening to discuss The Shackeltons seems to run counter to the notion of maintaining that air of romance and imagination. It isn't. Redding dominates the conversation, partly because he's the mercurial sort of guy who seems already to have thought in depth about any answer you throw at him and partly because the rest of the band wrestles with a phone that erupts into feedback every time they attempt its miserably conceived speakerphone function. But even from the get-go, it's clear the band doesn't want to cultivate that egocentric cult-of-personality type of following that's commonplace in the Internet age.

As many of their peers vie for fans' attention through mass emails, blog postings and website updates that chronicle everything from the progress of writing, recording and booking tours to the mundane details of daily life, The Shackeltons are all business. Redding and his fellows are eager to talk about anything that pertains to their music -- their influences, tour plans, artistic vision -- and subtly steer clear of anything that fishes for details about their lives outside of the rock. Frankly, rock's high egomaniac-to-adjusted ratio makes that a nice change of pace.

""I was thinking about how we're still kind of unknown. It gives people a thrill to discover us," Redding says. "I hope we have that feeling. I don't know how you keep that feeling. If I think about how I thought about bands, if I think about music and I imagine what the band is, usually my imagination thinks pretty good thoughts about the band. I kind of like the idea of people having their own thoughts about who we are or what we do, as long as they like our music. Imagination is usually better than reality."

Ambiguous? Perhaps. Stand-offish? The Shackeltons are hardly the train-wreck interview from the likes of Bob Dylan or John Lydon. In fact, the band still seems a little amazed that anyone would care to unravel its mystery -- and enthusiastically talks shop. Its members gush about future tour plans (do it a lot), ponder how the world at large will take to a sound that breaks with formulas and precedents (a source of anxiety in this countdown to its Jan. 29 release date) and already speculates about its sophomore effort (which will only surface when the band promotes The Shackeltons to the best of its ability).

True to his pledge to put the band before its members, Reddings' lyrics are a blurry mix of hints at his personal struggles. There's more than a few less-than-veiled nods to loves lost, troubled and far-flung, though they almost exclusively butt up against mad-at-the-world railings or struggles with shortcomings and inadequacies. He either deliberately muddies the waters by mixing his metaphors or naturally gravitates toward ambiguity. Either way, it makes for compelling songs -- even if, when pressed about it, he sticks to his band's party line of slippery, indistinct answers.

"I've suffered a lot of heartache with family tragedies, with the passing away of loved ones and people losing their minds," he explains. "I've seen a lot of stuff, a lot of mental illness. In the essence of what I do, I yearn for quietness and peace, so I enjoy being rambunctious. Music is that tension between yearning for that place of peace and love and hope and having all the tension of life that you're dealing with.

"I like to play basketball, and I'm kind of crazy on the basketball court. Then, when I'm at the coffee shop in my hometown, people can not believe that I'm in a loud band. I let a 60-year-old lady watch a video from Seattle. She could not believe that that's the same guy who sits quietly on the couch every morning. I'm either all quiet or I'm all crazy. I'm either athletic or I'm quiet. That's kind of the way I am."

Business As Unusual

If the band's all-for-one attitude is a change from the egotistical posturing of most of its peers, The Shackeltons are equally surprising in their transparency of their business ambitions. With the Sellout SS patrolling the underground ready to pounce on any act that -- gasp! -- has the gall to acknowledge the financial burden and artistic strains a career in music inevitably brings. Rather than sidestep that sticky wicket, The Shackeltons meet it head-on.

In all but the most foolhardy decision-making process, the choice to pack in the day job and take the band on the sort of touring that's necessary to become a full-time band is a business decision. You weigh opportunities against risks, venture against reward. For no matter how much the kids on the message board will bitch about it, going into a career in music means you have to be able to pay the bills. Like any good businessman, that means drawing up plans, forecasting the future and realizing that, on the most crass level, your albums, shows and merchandise are commodities and consumables to be purchased. It's a cold world, kid, get used to it.

Rather than living in denial about the basic reality of making music your profession -- namely, that you're going to have to worry about finances -- The Shackeltons are making the smart moves now -- building a business plan.

"It's the difference between doing business and doing smart business," Redding explains. "I've seen people set up coffee shops and they had fluorescent lighting and no taste in atmosphere and their coffee's not that great, so people don't come back. Then there are people who really set up a nice environment, serve really good coffee and have good customer service. It's a good business plan and they're willing to take a year or so to get that business off the ground and they have a plan. Having a plan is important. That's what we want. We want to have a plan that works. We're patient, but we're not complacent."

Guitarist Schuchman agrees. "It's two things that we really need to focus on," he interjects. "Making sure we have a product that does get sold and that we back up that product. As far as the record selling, we just have to wait and see. Hopefully, we'll organize a really good tour and we'll have new listeners and new fans buying that CD."

And that might leave the band open to self-righteous criticism from the sellout patrol, but The Shackeltons are fine with that -- mostly because they know the realities of real-world finances. They're standing on their own feet, a spot Redding speculates that most of the self-righteous bands and fans simply don't understand.

"I think that's the difference between people who are living off their parents' Visa cards. We talk business because we're not. We are going to talk about business. We're going to be honest about it. We're not touring on our parents' dime, none of us have that kind of support. The closest thing we have to it, our drummer, Sean, his parents donated their Honda minivan as our tour van. We can use that any time we want. Nobody's given us money to do this. We don't have mommy and daddy's credit cards. We all work jobs. We do talk about business and it's a reality."

Just Listen

If those admissions put you off to The Shackeltons, you'd probably not understand the band anyway. After all, all this is really superfluous, really. The Shackeltons are about the music. Period. Forget trying to use lyric sheets as a mean to psychoanalyze its members. Don't expect a lot of public-image posturing from its members. Don't even expect those blog posts that treat their readers like intimates. Like Redding says, The Shackeltons aren't ready to promote their personalities before their music. They are ready, though, to do whatever it takes to get their record into your ears.

"Anything that we have to pay our dues, we're willing to do it," Redding says. "Our label, we don't have tour support. Some labels give the band X amount of dollars to go out and tour. We don't get that. We're touring on our own dime. We're doing our best to find that balance where we can promote this CD and be a full-time band some day, but not be debtors to our community. We're with good people and a good label, but it's not a label that's making it overly easy for us."