Reflecting for a moment on his band's newest music, Archers of Loaf bassist Matt Gentling feigned concern that the nearly completed album lacked one crucial element: the Mom and Dad scorn factor.

"My parents really like it," Gentling said backstage before a recent show at the Trocadero, a small club in Philadelphia.

"That might be a bad sign," 27-year-old singer/guitarist Eric Bachmann reminded him.

Despite this parental approval, Gentling and the band seem content with the 10- song album, which is being mixed in a Charlotte, N.C., studio. White Trash Heroes, as it is tentatively titled after one of the cuts, will be Archers of Loaf's fourth full-length album. It's due out in late August or early September.

But Bachmann said the power-pop rockers have changed their sound somewhat on this one, pulling back from the aggro-rock sound that has dominated much of their work and giving the songs a little more room to breath, Bachmann said. And this all was accomplished with Brian Paulsen, who produced the Archers' 1996 album, All the Nation's Airports, once again standing behind the sound board.

"Everybody keeps telling me [the new record] is more adventurous," Bachmann said. "There's more space in the songs than in the past." In fact, two of the tunes pass the seven-minute mark.

"Airports came together as a whole," Bachmann added later. "This one is a little bit more just a collection of songs than a start-to-finish work."

The Archers' altered sonic approach was made clear during the band's show that night at Trocadero, part of a recent five-date mini-tour that took the band around the East Coast. New songs such as "Dead Red Eyes" and "Perfect Time" were gentler, more expansive and less noisy than older favorites such as "Harnessed in Slums" and "Web in Front," which the Archers also played live.

At the performance, the Archers did without the low-tech Yamaha PSS-50 synthesizer that Gentling said was used extensively on the new record. "It has 99 sounds, and four of them are great, and the rest suck ... Mine has the Billy Joel demo key on it," he said. "The thing is, you buy an $8,000 keyboard and only one or two of the sounds are good."

To make more room on the recording for the new sounds, Bachmann said, the Archers relied less on his and Eric Johnson's guitars. As a result, Bachmann said, "The vocals aren't as buried. I don't have to shout as much." Rather than talk up the new album, Johnson, 28, spent his free time before the Trocadero gig catching another band's show elsewhere in Philadelphia.

The new songs were written over a one-year period when the band as a unit was relatively inactive, practicing sporadically and not touring or recording at all, according to 26-year-old drummer Mark Price.

The bandmembers apparently needed the rest, Bachmann said, because they started to burn out from performing more than 200 shows a year. To ease the pressure, Bachmann traveled during the hiatus, writing pieces of a few songs in such faraway places as Newfoundland, Canada. Meanwhile, Johnson and Price remained in the band's town of origin, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Gentling returned to his hometown of Asheville, N.C.

In addition to recuperating, bandmembers worked at odd jobs during their break: Price at a bike shop, Gentling chipping wood and de-limbing trees and Bachmann as a medical courier near his home in Atlanta, delivering "eggs, blood, semen, whatever."

The new album, Bachmann added, will be the Archers' last for Alias Records, which released the group's three other full-length albums, as well as an EP. And while the band doesn't have another specific label in mind, Bachmann said he couldn't even say for sure that the Archers would make a fifth record. "When we started, we said we would stop if we weren't having fun," he said. "We'll see how we feel when we're done touring for this record."