Shiny Around the Edges wouldn’t have made its album in any other town but Denton.

This summer has been good to the Denton three-piece — which is Michael and Jenny Seman and Kerm Rivas. Not only did the local outfit complete Denton’s Dreaming, to be released Sept. 14 on vinyl, but the band played at the Dallas Observer Music Awards ceremony last month.

Courtesy photo/Go Figure Skate

Shiny Around the Edges — Michael Seman, left, Kerm Rivas and Jenny Seman — has had a busy summer, which will culminate in the Sept. 14 release of the band’s latest album, Denton’s Dreaming.

The group also managed to join a reportedly raucous house show that is destined to end up in a feature-length documentary now in production, 40 Nights of Rock & Roll.

Deep summer, though, has belonged to the road for both Shiny and its tour-mate, Dust Congress. The bands have spent two weeks on do-it-yourself concerts in St. Louis, Chicago and New York City. Wednesday night, members of the band and Dust Congress mingled in a Philadelphia brownstone before heading out to play a gig.

“This album is more a collection of songs. Holy Roller was much more thematic,” Michael Seman said. “We’re a three-piece, and this album was much more about us coalescing as a band.”

And coalesce they have. Shiny Around the Edges is a tight ensemble. That’s not to be confused with tight in terms of sleek, produced songs. The album doesn’t patch over rough edges with software. When you hear piano on the album, it evokes the mellow, boxy sound that only an upright can produce. Rivas and Michael Seman twist guitar and bass lines together without clipping off any rusty barbs. The result is that Denton’s Dreaming has an immediate, uncensored feel.

The band started recording the album last summer, almost immediately after getting Holy Roller in the can with Matthew J. Barnhart. The holdup was the question of how to release the record. The trio eventually settled on vinyl. They made the album at the Echo Lab just outside Denton, and finished some tracks at the studio of Paperstain Records, an in-house setup at Justin Lemons’ residence.

Michael Seman said the tour includes several shows organized by Denton expatriates.

“I wouldn’t say that touring informs the creative process for us,” Michael Seman said. “That comes for us when we have time to sit down and think. Touring is always hard. It’s a lot of driving and socializing. And that’s important. It’s a relationship-building thing for us. But the creative part doesn’t happen on the road, really. It doesn’t seem to work that way for us.”

Denton is both the setting and a character in the album. Michael Seman said Denton’s music revival has made the here and now an important moment for musicians who mean to explore and produce without packing up and heading to a bigger city.

“Denton’s a college town. That’s one thing it’s got going for it,” he said. “You have this ongoing new energy in the city from the school, but you also have an established community that likes to help out, which might be a Texas thing. If you want to survive the summer, you help out.”

Now that the album is ready for the shelves, Seman said he hears a band that has found its stride.

“I think we’re finally focused on our sound. All of us — me, Jenny, Kerm — have explored some traditional pop music structures, but we’ve also experimented with some other things. We’re very happy about that.”

The band will play in Denton on Sept. 11 at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios for a Denton Humane Society fundraiser.

For more information, visit the band’s website at www.shinyaroundtheedges.com.

 LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com .

Shiny Around the Edges brings us a sound that benefits from experience, and the kind of musical seasoning that hits the ear like wine hits the palate. That first taste? The tang of Michael Seman’s guitar is all mood and meat from the black gumbo of the North Texas soil. The next note is a lighter bouquet of Jenny Seman’s voice — a mezzo-contralto that can go from dewy to deluxe in the same song. Before long, we have the primal throb of Kerm Rivas’ bass work.

If Shiny does nothing else, it deals in a kind of musical heft. The three-piece makes music you can sink your teeth into. In “Barcelona,” Rivas and the Semans play with a traditional sort of pop structure. One track later, in “Secrets of the Double Blind,” the group reaches back to a bluesy tradition that weights the song with Rivas’ sludgy bass and the lyrics that remind us “Jesus is coming/for the second time” before Jenny Seman lets a floor tom have it.

Denton’s Dreaming fulfills the promise of Shiny’s 2009 release, Holy Roller. In this latest album, the band’s blues gains dimension from gospel, folk and rock forebears. And yet there is a little something else in the album, too. The trio has a flash of showmanship in its songwriting — we can see macabre performance artist Diamanda Galas covering “Robinwood Must Burn,” not in her typical hellhound fashion, but as a sweet, ragtime serenade to the Grim Reaper.

It’s hard to listen to Denton’s Dreaming without feeling that there’s something sinister out there in the spiky, yellow Denton grass. It’s just as hard to finish the album without the feeling that Shiny is all about that eclipse in the middle of things — where none of that shine touches. Take for instance, Michael Seman’s confession in “Trust Me”: “I broke my nose just to see the blood/I can breathe better now.”

It’s deeper in the dark, and Shiny’s light only falls so far.

—Lucinda Breeding