It's unlikely anyone will listen to Ambulance Ltd's debut album, LP, and accuse the New York-based quartet of being predictable. The disc starts with an instrumental, "Yoga Means Union", that spends the better part of three minutes constructing a moody landscape of rolling drums and electric-mainline slide guitar before kicking into a motorik beat bearing all the hallmarks of circa-'75 Krautrock. Next up is "Primitive (The Way I Treat You)", on which singer-guitarist Marcus Congleton does his best Lou Reed (via Stephen Malkmus) over a slow-chugging indie-blues groove. "Anecdote" follows, a dirt-road roots-pop number that wouldn't sound out of place on an Old 97's disc. Then comes "Heavy Lifting", with its dreamy spiral of yearning vocals and shoegazing whammy-bar bends.

And so on. Ambulance Ltd's members clearly have interesting record collections and they aren't afraid to plunder them for ideas that shouldn't sound so damn good together but do anyway. The group's wide-ranging tastes are doubtless due to the fact that it is composed of four men from different parts of the map. Congleton is from Eugene, Oregon; guitarist Benjamin Lysaght moved to the Big Apple from Santa Monica, California; drummer Darren Beckett was born in Belfast, Ireland; and bassist Matthew Dublin spent his youth in New England.

The four now consider themselves New Yorkers, however, and being from the city that never sleeps certainly didn't hurt when Ambulance Ltd toured the U.K. a couple of years back as Suede's opening act. Those gigs helped the then-unknown outfit generate a buzz with the notoriously fickle British music press, and it wasn't long before New Musical Express was declaring Ambulance Ltd "New York's next most important band".

"Our record just came out there last week," Beckett says, reached somewhere on the road between Phoenix, Arizona, and Pomona, California. "When we did the tour with Suede, I don't even think we had an EP out at that point. So now it's all falling into place. We have the record out and we're gonna go back over there again, probably in May or June, and do some headlining gigs. I think you need more than just being a band from New York. It can work for a minute, you know."

So, just what do the guys in Ambulance Ltd listen to in the tour van? Beckett drops the names of seminal German art-rock bands Can and Neu!, and his bandmates have been known to give props to the Pixies and My Bloody Valentine. No surprises there. What might raise a few hipster eyebrows is the group's unabashed admiration of adult-contemporary softies such as Seals & Crofts and Hall & Oates. Yes, that Hall & Oates. "We think they're fucking amazing songwriters and they always had a great band, and we're really influenced by that, me and Matt especially," Beckett says. "We're always influenced by great bass and drums, and I think Hall & Oates always had good rhythm sections." Fair enough-but let's hope Ambulance Ltd doesn't break into any impromptu renditions of "Maneater" when it plays UBC's Pit Pub on Saturday (April 2).