Our neighborhood, these days, is teeming with chipmunks, scuttling this way and that, looking like they run all of our yards, as tiny, tiny valets or loiterers. They never stay in one place for long, even when they think no one's watching them, as we always are through the backyard windows. It's an endless game of chase and be caught, no matter the humidity or the energy that might be in the tanks of the little critters. They do laps and laps, zipping here and there, changing course with their small claws poking into the soil or skidding over the concrete - under bushes, tearing through the grass and bouncing off any nearby trees that just serve as pivot points. What Laura Says, thinks and feels gives off a similar sort of never exasperating, never expiring exuberance in its approach to songwriting and just as importantly, to the playful interactions of people to one another. The songs on the Tempe, Arizona band's debut full-length, "Thinks and Feels," are all motion and constant shifting and shaping, roly-poly chunks of rabid and unmethodical excursions into the first few doors of the creative mind's work room. It's a room that features numerous overlapping thoughts and criss-crossing paths that find ways to melt into each other in little parts, tangling themselves all together into some nugget of original expression that's borderline bizarre. They're light and airy and they jump off, darting left and then right and rounding back around so that it all makes as much sense as is intended. The band uses its adventurous side without letting up, giving its songs real character that succeeds in portraying all of the young turbulence that goes into the making of fresh and new romances, or ones now suffering the debilitating effects of efforts gone awry. What Laura Says and the music it makes tends to feel like a bundle of nerves and agitation and apprehension that cannot be reasoned with, just witnessed, almost as a voyeur. It feels as if a lifetime's worth of passion and real living is getting crammed into these pieces of time that they put together around an idea or a phrasing of an idea. It's the way young romances tend to work - the total immersion and the sucking dry of all energies by being with, talking to and thinking about the other person until it eventually begins to taper off and seem a little much to at least one half of the duo. The band has a way of making this manic and idiosyncratic way of going about their writing not come across as being a detrimental part of the effort, but one that sets it apart from the norm, enhancing all of the flighty and well, fucking manic ways that people get worked over or are worked over on a daily basis. It goes without saying that sometimes the music that needs to be coming out of and into our bodies should take on some of this reflective glow. It should feel odd and laden with voices and thoughts that need reckoning, whatever that actually entails.