As Ziggy Stardust – arguably the utmost gimmick in the history of pop gimmicks – David Bowie could change gears and defy expectations at any time. Elton John, the Talking Heads and Madonna also benefited from the same reputation for the unpredictable, the occasionally outlandish. It pays to have a gimmick when that gimmick is enigmatic, and when it grants a musician license to change indefinitely.

But when a gimmick limits a band's range – as demonstrated by the Mathematicians' new record Level One – the approach is slightly more problematic. The Mathematicians have a good sound, but their debut effort is so overburdened by their own irritating shtick that their sound hardly seems to matter to them, let alone to us.

This Lake George, NY-based threesome is: Pete Pythagoras on bass, Albert Gorithm on drums, and Dewey Decimal on keyboards, synth, and laptop / vocoder. The Mathematicians are two bands in one. One band pursues the holy grail: music produced by machines that does not sacrifice the expression of instrumental music. On Level One, this ambition expresses itself through an unusual combination of synthetic electro and post-punk instrumentation (real drums over click tracks or drum-machine beats and vocoder-distorted vocals over straight vocals.)

The second band dedicates itself to sabotaging the sincere musicality and ambition of the first band, in a mirthless and irritating effort to sound more "mathy" – which means repetitive chanting about pie charts and PEMDAS in ecstatic Keebler Elf voices.

"Not A Theme" starts out as a catchy pop rock ditty with a soaring synth line, interrupted by an unusual deep electro bridge – a great track, besides the elves inexplicably screaming "Pulls it together!" over and over in the background. "Input/Output," with its spoken vocals over a drum-n-bass beat, is a dance groove almost in the tradition of Peaches – except that the sexpot female vocals have been replaced with the Keeblers intoning tongue-in-cheek references to the mathematical order of operations. The synth scales of "Hypoteneuse of Love," climbing over machine-and-man-made symbol-rich rhythms, sound like a digital sunrise.

But you know what? Sometimes, when they want to get really math-tacular, the Mathematicians replace human vocals altogether with those Apple computer voices. You know why? Because they sound like robots! Mathematicians love robots! Haha!

It is unpleasant to imagine this going on for more than one album. Luckily, the Mathematicians don't seem to have any real interest in or affection for math, and one can only hope their numerological references will eventually run dry. And there are some gems on Level One: the drum-machine / drum set binary makes "4 Eyes" a danceable nerd-core hip hop anthem. "Harpsicode" is a refreshingly instrumental drum-n-bass track, like "Input / Output" without the misguided gimmick. The Mathematicians shouldn't have a hard time making their next LP; it's just a matter of picking up where the real band left off – and stepping on those pesky Keeblers.