It�s the oldest story in the book. You start out trying to make a mess and end up just making something. Ask Thurston Moore. Or Mick Jagger. Subterfuge becomes de rigeur. You find yourself (to borrow a phrase from Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren) conjuring cash from chaos, and all of a sudden you�re a bad boy with well-buttered bread.

US Maple�s own insubordination was an odd one. On their first couple of records, they sounded like a rock band that wanted nothing to do with one another, led by a puny Ratso Rizzo with delusions of Jim Morrison. The songs were fantastically off-kilter, as if each member were playing from a different set list. Sure, they were all playing US Maple songs, but were they playing the same one at the same time?

With Purple on time., the slop has become style, which might upset those that love to be upset about such things, but stasis kills rock bands, and the decision to play together (abetted by new drummer Adam Vida, formerly of Edith Frost, who holds the band together like Sonic Youth�s Steve Shelley in slo-mo) was a good one. Their lumbering, stumbling, melodic-yet-riffless sound is intact, but they seem to be enjoying each other�s company just a little bit more these days.

The oldest trick in the book to breaking the cycle of the oldest story in the book is to do an unlikely cover. Here it�s Dylan�s �Lay Lady Lay,� done almost faithfully, rasped and rattled and then fading without resolution, which, come to think of it, is the way the oldest story in the book ends as well.