By Kimberly Chun

I MAY NOT have learned everything I needed to know in kindergarten, but a few lessons stuck. Don't take candy from strangers. Don't stick beans up your nose. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is – even if it shows up in your favorite alt-weekly.

"Oh, I didn't even tell you. All that six weeks of work I did – it's going to pay nothing," Film School vocalist-guitarist Krayg Burton tells guitarist-vocalist Nyles Lannon. They'd been drinking at the Phone Booth earlier in the evening, before heading over on a writerly whim to Café Macondo, and the tangential asides were multiplying. "I just found out a few days ago. Six weeks of work – nothing! I'm in even bigger debt now."

"I don't even want to hear this," Lannon mutters, looking like he's bracing himself for a blow.

"You know, I found an ad in the Guardian that said, 'Work from home! $1,500 a week!' And now ..."

Resplendent in a jaunty pink visor, 9 o'clock growth, and a shadowy soul patch, Burton looks oddly pleased to deliver the news that he's still enrolled in the school of hard knocks. Malcolm X and Geronimo smile down on him from Macondo's walls, the economy's down, anxiety's up, and he's at debt's door. Things couldn't be more hunky-dory in the band he founded, Film School, one of the more melancholic bands in the Bay Area. The San Francisco group's new EP, Alwaysnever (Amazing Grease), has been receiving admiring reviews, they've been getting much college radio airplay, and the fates seem to be following through on the promise of their last album, the perhaps prophetically titled Brilliant Career. Yet life still sorta sucks – just as he suspected.

It makes me wonder what Film School's sad sacks do for fun, which really throws them for a loop. "Wow, what do you do for fun?" Laddon repeats, sounding a little dazed. "The hardest question of the day."

"Yeah. Fun." Burton says, shaking his head and smiling. "We're all working on that now with our individual therapists."

They should get happy about Alwaysnever, a lovely, all-too-brief collection of four poppy dream-rock numbers that embraces shoegazer drone, slow-moving beats, and delicate electronic embellishments. Picture Swervedriver and the Notwist cozying up to Grandaddy, who's nodding out under pashmina-soft quilts of pilled and sampled fuzz. It's a little night music for fretful indie rockers who want to sleep, perchance to dream, and disappear on the astral plane. It's also the first release by the current, collaborative incarnation of the band, whose revolving lineup has included Kyle Statham of Fuck and Scott Kannberg, late of Pavement and now of Preston School of Industry and the label Amazing Grease. Burton assembled the group – which includes Lannon, drummer Ben Montesano, bassist Justin Labo, and keyboardist Jason Ruck – for his Brilliant Career tour in 2001.

"As soon as we finished that, it was like, 'OK, let's write a completely new set of songs, because I know this is the band that I've been looking for a long time,' " Burton recalls. " 'Activated' [on Alwaysnever] was one of the songs that best represents our collaborative effort and where we're all coming from."

Which is from all over. Former Deadhead Lannon had played noise improv with Azusa Plane before he met Burton through his former workplace, music Web site Epitonic. "I was playing in this arena where it's all about dynamics and atmospheric stuff," he says, while Labo, a hardcore vet and Who fiend, is "an amazing electronic producer, extremely talented at making beats and stuff." Burton knew Montesano from their last band, Pinq, now known as the Decoration.

Why this lineup over any other? They stuck around, stayed in School, and never strayed from the path, supposes Burton, who's not shy about jumping in and correcting Lannon when he needs to. "I'm not getting weird, but I think it really is about the perseverance," he says. "There's a group of people that you're learning from, but at the same time, a kind of belief in the project and a willingness to stick it out. You know, it's not always magic. It just fucking isn't. It would be nice if it was. You'd be like, 'Aah, this is the greatest group ever, and we fit together like little Lego pieces.' And it just doesn't happen that way, and sometimes it comes down to the people that stick together to get through the shit, you know."

For a vocalist who sounds like he spends quality time in dreamland, Burton is a hard-nosed realist. It took a little time and distance, he says, just as Film School have taken a while to find their footing as they continue to evolve. In fact, the band name itself came from a mix tape label owned by a former music partner, Paige Weber of Van Gogh's Daughter. Only later did he realize how well the name suited him.