On first listen, German outfit The Dawn Band seems a strange fit for Elektohasch Schallplatten, which over the last couple years has geared itself toward fostering the European heavy psych scene in the wake of Colour Haze’s impact thereon. The Munich duo’s debut, Agents of Sentimentality, touches on that style with some sporadically fuzzed guitar and riffy focus, but no more than it touches on classic prog, power pop or European club music. Along with the hardcore punk of DxBxSx, it represents the label stepping away from its usual fare, but it makes more sense when one discovers that Daniel Zerndl — who here handles guitar, drums, vocals and synth alongside Martin Treppesch’s guitar, bass and synth and a host of guest contributions – plays or played drums in Hainloose, whose last album, Burden State, was released via Elektrohasch in 2006. Hainloose guitarist/vocalist Haris Turkanovic, Colour Haze guitarist/vocalist (and Elektrohasch founder) Stefan Koglek and Canadian singer-songwriter Annick Michel also show up throughout Agents of Sentimentality, resulting in a widely-varied sound that’s nonetheless presented with some idea of flow.

The album is bookended by “Love is a Burglar” and the surprisingly heavier revisit “Love is a Burglar (Reprise),” and if one takes the two in a row, it’s possible to get some sense of the scope of Agents of Sentimentality. Zerndl and Treppesch play off a vast array of influences, and their arrangements are well captured in the recording by Tom Höfer, as the album immediately sets about playing its sundry styles off a base of heavy prog. There are several strong displays of songwriting – the Weezer-esque alt rock “City Lights (Shine On)” and acoustic “Boat Across the Ocean,” led by Michel’s vocals, come to mind as immediate examples – but The Dawn Band feel geared more toward instrumental exploration than working strictly within verse/chorus/verse confines. Their sound isn’t experimental in the sense of weirdness for its own sake, but one does get the sense in listening that Zerndl and Treppesch (who are joined by drummer Jan van Meerendonk in the live incarnation of the band) are pushing themselves in terms of the direction these songs are moving.

They give flashes of riff-led heaviness early on with the end of “City Lights (Shine On),” but the shorter “Lost Soul at the Night Club” comes out of somewhere else completely, sounding like an effort to organically recreate sounds one might usually hear in an electronica dance track in the earlier part of the song before Zerndl calls out the fuzz, morphing it into the kind of freakout that’s usually the highlight of a Porcupine Tree record. It’s a lot of ground to cover in 2:44, but with the eight and a half minute instrumental sprawl of “Surfing the Big Wave” following, there’s plenty of time to digest. “Surfing the Big Wave” comes on in three subtitled movements – “Bursting at the Seams,” “Out into the Water” and “The Struggle (with the Wind Against Your Face and Salt in the Eye)” – and follows an appropriate and increasingly driving course befitting those movements, though where exactly the divide between one and the next is, I couldn’t say.

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