Spatula is an eclectic Chapel Hill, North Carolina trio whose members wend their ways through an incredibly wide variety of material -- some of it hectic and helter-skelter, some of it cool and composed -- often in the course of a single song. Their primarily instrumental experimental rock sound seems to be one of a group struck dumb by the emptiness of today's sprawling postindustrial, megalopolitan landscape, capable only of squeezing brooding, disjointed musical patterns and shapes from their instruments.