By Jennifer Maerz

FOR THOSE LIVING through them, Seattle winters can become intense sensory-deprivation tanks. The Northwest's color scheme stalls between shades of steel and soot gray for weeks on end. The forecast calls for four months of mold spreading under every leaky corner, and anyone not working up a bar tab is holed away far out of sight.

In some cities that annual lurch toward seasonal affective disorder would cultivate a music scene dominated by razor-blade shades of Morrissey and Joy Division. But some of Seattle's most compelling artists warp that wintry mood while working within it, fighting the instinct to curl up and navel-gaze and instead giving the omnipresent murky vibe a good jolt sideways.

Lars Finberg, the brains behind the Intelligence, is one such anti-brooder, masterminding spastic postapocalyptic records for the lo-fi set. Imagine a bedroom cluttered with home recording equipment and a musician with a cynical lyrical bent – a next next-generation Robert Pollard infatuated with the Fall, the Country Teasers, and PiL – and you'll begin to get a sense of the mind-set.

Since 1999, Finberg has been spiking Seattle with various art- and noise-damaged bands, the best-known being the short-lived raucous punk outfit Dipers and the dense, methodical A Frames (which release Black Forest on Sub Pop March 22). But it's the Intelligence that Finberg can truly call his own, experimenting behind the scenes like the mad Wizard of Odd, testing various songwriting methods, and working through a rotating cast of Northwest talent.

Over the years the Intelligence ranks have shrunk to one (on recordings) and swelled to four (onstage), setting a sharp contrast between the prerecorded output and its live interpretation. Intelligence bassist Calvin Lee Reeder jokes that the band members are connected by "alcohol tolerance," but musically, the constants are Finberg's deadpan Mark E. Smith vocals, his cynical couplets ("Telephone wires / connecting the liars / directly to fires / that never get tired"), and the Wire-y wiring of a band amplified through blankets of fuzz. Performers like Country Teasers guitarist Robert McNeill praise Finberg's way with a lyric, saying he has "a talent for the lapidary phrase, familiarity with humor – one suspects the author of actually reading books."

"Both A Frames and the Intelligence are beer-drinking guys who hang out and make fun of everything, but just naturally it all comes out smarter than [with most punk bands]," says Sub Pop publicist Jed Maheu, who played with the Intelligence a couple years back. "And Lars just does his own thing regardless of what people think or who he's playing with. That's part of the reason that band has been around for so long."

The Intelligence made its debut in 2003 with Boredom and Terror (Omnibus), a scrap heap of tin-can drum beats, barbed guitar riffs, and disembodied drum machine belches dragged through delay pedals. The album has the feel of industrial dissolution, a musician trapped in the last warehouse left on Earth pounding out an echoing, analog homage to the machine age. Finberg recorded it while watching sitcoms in the bedroom of his west Seattle house. "Recording at home doesn't mean I, like, sit and 'record,' " he says. "It's more like I'll just run the drum machine for two minutes and run the bass over that or play the keyboard because the bass is over at [drummer] Matthew [Ford's] house or whatever. From that, the stuff that I liked more I would try to do verse, chorus, verse over it and then see what someone else [in the band] would do to it."

This spring will bring the release of the Intelligence's second full-length, Icky Baby, coming out on Los Angeles garage mayhem label In the Red (the Hunches, Lost Sounds, the Hospitals) and mastered by Weasel Walter. The album title is a nickname for guitarist Nicholas Brawley and for the dented and indentured romantic relationship Finberg grinds through the lyric mill throughout the record.

"I became aware of [the Intelligence] as being a band with an A Frames connection. I'm a huge A Frames fan, so I bought the Intelligence album right when it came out, and I was completely blown away," In the Red's Larry Hardy says. "I fell in love with Boredom and Terror the first time I heard it. The songs are catchy as hell."

Finberg says he just aims for a "fucked-up version of pop music." "I spend half my time with A Frames and listening to stuff like the Konet Project, Debris, weird composer shit, and The Shining soundtrack, and another part listening to Missy Elliott." His challenge is tweaking both sides of the spectrum. "Like if the vocals [sounded] like a Queen song [with] a crummy sense of pitch – it's fun to put some delay on them and double them with one voice not caring about being in tune," he says. "Or [using] a trashy keyboard beat, trying to balance that with a fruity guitar [riff]. This lineup of the band is attractive because we share a lot of the same tastes in all of that stuff. In the van everyone gets as stoked on the obscure shit like Paris's Le Amanirea as 'Fuck the Police,' which were the two most played things on the last tour. Not that I think those things are very far apart at all." Intelligence play with Le Flange du Mal and A-Tension Fri/28, 10 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, S.F. $6. (415) 923-0923.