You’re living in New Hampshire after getting your degree in art from a respectable college and looking to play in an equally respectable band, and now you’re faced with starting off in a state never known for its musical climate. What do you do? If you’re any of the guys from Mistaken for the Gifted, you stick to your guns and fight the good fight for immaginative rock bands everywhere by playing an organic combination that could be described as The Cure meets Helmet, or Depeche Mode and Nirvana ’s love child, still drenched and messy with the grime of birth all over its body.

You’d incorporate kinetic live shows that would belay a DIY punk ethic, while combining it with a sort of epic storytelling vocal style and a patchwork, subjective lyrical style. You’d have a healthy respect for dynamic range a la A Perfect Circle, and a love of noise akin to Mogwai or Dredg. Lastly you’d include the savvy aesthetic sense of 16 combined years of higher education in art and make the whole package cooperate with itself in print and on screen. That should work, right?

The beginnings are humble enough; a guitarist (Todd Kramer) gathers up a few guys he’s been playing music with since high school (Travis Commeau, Adam Untiet and Frank Bitetto) and when they’re all on break from college, write music that they’d be proud of. Stuff they’d be inclined to pay for as opposed to download. When they finish school, they play whatever dive’s they can manage, miraculously meet an interested investor who throws them into a studio somewhere in the un-mapped wilderness of New Hampshire and hands them a bunch of money to pay the engineer with. Luckily, said studio (Mojo Music) is also the home to the largest independent radio shows on the planet, and after a few nice tequilla drinks Mistaken for the Gifted have maneuvered their way onto radio waves all over the globe.

The Higgs Boson EP (the theoretical particle brought into existence through a focussed exertion of energy; the origin of gravity) is Mistaken for the Gifted’s self-produced debut independent demo release. The album shows a fair cross-section of a much larger body of work, with “We Will Always Be Well” and “Letter of Intent” giving a ride from vaporous, almost ethereal rock soundscapes, climbing to the edge of a precipice that a song like “Texas for Hire” throws you off of. Even with dynamics like these, it’s only the beginning. The lows get lower and the highs climb more and more skyward on the host of tracks Mistaken for the Gifted mix in at their live shows, reeling the listener in to a simple, open gesture and then kicking their knees out from under them just to remind them where they are.