There's a bad habit in music journalism that - lazy and ineffective though it may be - sometimes remains unavoidable. In fact, there are several other examples of it, from me, in this very issue of the Weekly Volcano. I'm talking about relying too heavily on calling out perceived influences in bands. At its most egregious, it devolves into variations on "it's this band meets that band with a sprinkle of this third band."

While this can sometimes help to give the reader an understanding of what the band in question sounds like, it's ultimately misleading. Unless a band goes on record with something like, "We're basically the Replacements meets the Strokes with a sprinkle of Big Audio Dynamite" - and, trust me, the music scene is lousy with bands saying stuff like that - your guesses as to what music the band is drawing from will frequently be projections.

Case in point: In my interview with the Mantles, I brought up the fact that they tend to get a lot of comparisons to the '80s Flying Nun Records era of New Zealand indie-rock - a time when bands were moving toward jangly guitars and sweet harmonies that paid tribute to similarly jangly bands from the ‘60s. It's an easy enough comparison to make, but no, I'm told. They just like bands from the ‘60s. It's then that you realize that, of course, there's no out-thinking someone else's creative process.

The Mantles hail from San Francisco, where legions of bands are embracing the '60s sound, though largely in the context of fuzzy garage rock, this sort of Nuggets influence that seems to color all Bay Area bands. Meanwhile, the Mantles tend to incorporate brightly ringing guitars with delicately hazy melodies. Each song, while lo-fi, is a chiming bit of bubbly sound that defies the current trend of shrouding songs in fuzzy haze.

"I had moved to the city, and I knew that Virginia (Weatherby) lived here," says frontman Michael Olivares. "She had a drum set. I went over there and asked if she wanted to jam sometime. She was at school, at the time, but she had the summer off. My friend and I - Jermaine, he was the original bassist - we started jamming with her. It was a summer love affair."

As far as the big headline-getting bands from the Bay Area go, the Mantles are awfully lackadaisical with their output. Considering bands like Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin - artists that tend to release two albums a year - the production of the Mantles seems fairly sparse. Having formed in 2004, they've only released two LP's: one in 2006, and another released last year.

It was at this point that Virginia Weatherby, Michael Olivares' wife and drummer, came in and brought some sense to the interview.

"We're a band that just plays to have fun," says Weatherby. "We did have some issues. Michael and I got married in the middle of (the hiatus), which kind of slowed us down. And he had a hand injury, where he couldn't play guitar."

"Yeah," says Olivares, "for about a year and a half, I couldn't play guitar, so that postponed things."

What we have, after all of these delays, is their second LP, Long Enough to Leave. What we find is the same Mantles that we found on the first LP, but refined in a way that helps to alleviate the comparisons that heavied the band before. We still find the bright guitar of the C86 movement, as well as the stately form of the Kinks and the bubbly pop of those late ‘60s psychedelics - but we always end up at the Mantles. There's no explaining how the Mantles ended up where they are, only to see that they're there.

THE MANTLES, w/ Still Caves, Not From Brooklyn, Loser Dog, 9 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 30, The New Frontier Lounge, 301 E. 25th St., Tacoma, $5, 253.572.4020