Left turns don't get much more pronounced than the one made by the Waking Eyes on its way to a second album. Between the band's debut and Video Sound, its recently released follow-up and first for a major label, the Winnipeg quartet all but abandoned charming, blissed-out psychedelia for hard-edged, classic rock ­derived riffage.

It's as if the group woke up one morning to find its XTC vitamins had been replaced by Sloan pills.

"It's definitely a natural progression for us," says Steve Senkiw, calling from the Toronto office of the Waking Eyes' management company. The drummer adds that one member, founder Myron Schulz, had quit right after the first album, Combing the Clouds. That left just Senkiw, and singer-guitarists Matt Peters and Rusty Matyas. "And the first things that came out of us were rock songs," says Senkiw. "We thought 'This is a lot more fun to play, and we can do it live.' So we started writing songs that way."

Prior to the Waking Eyes, Senkiw and Peters had been in the Pets, the best band ever to come out of Steinbach, Manitoba. As with the Waking Eyes' debut, the one and only Pets record was as much about fooling around with the recording process as it was about writing cool, melodic pop songs. All that time spent cooped up in basements took its toll, however. "It [the new approach] is maybe our rebellion against what we'd been doing before," says Senkiw. "It was time for us to focus on songwriting and what we can do live."

Listening to Video Sound, it's easy to imagine the songs electrifying a sweaty, rowdy audience, which is what the Waking Eyes will face when it opens for the heavily hyped U.K. band the Music this Monday (December 6) at the Commodore. The lead-off track "Watch Your Money" and second single "Beginning" are screaming rockers that could make Danko Jones give up the stage for needlepoint. "More Than What You're Givin' " sounds as though it was written between runs to the drive-through beer store (a Winnipeg tradition), and "But I Already Have It" and "Get Up Easy" produce enough heat to warm a Prairie garage in the middle of January.

To help the group make the move from tea-drinking psych-popsters to brew-swilling riff-monsters, the Eyes--bolstered by new bassist Joey Penner--brought in Toronto producer Arnold Lanni, the man partly responsible for modern-rock-radio stalwarts Our Lady Peace. Lanni also shares writing credit.

"We clicked right away," Senkiw says. "What we wanted to do anyways was more four-on-the-floor. I know that term's used a lot. But in our live shows, with the Pets and with the Waking Eyes' first incarnation, we were really struggling. Because of how many tracks we used on the record it never really related live."