Zammuto Plays at Glasslands Gallery The previous band on Nick Zammuto's résumé is the Books, and his new one, Zammuto, stays on the cerebral side. It's a four-man band that augments guitars, keyboard, bass and drums with video and computer capabilities. Zammuto From left, Mike Zammuto, Nick Zammuto and Gene Back at Glasslands Gallery. Sean Dixon is the other member of the band. It came to Glasslands Gallery on Monday night with songs from its new album, also called "Zammuto" (Temporary Residence), that merge the nimble, the knotty, the philosophical and the pensive, living up to song titles like "Too Late to Topologize" and "Idiom Wind." Mr. Zammuto likes his music stratified, with different layers moving at different speeds, nested mathematically. By way of a model, the set included Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," with its quick-stepping, stop-start drumbeat behind the unhurried chords and vocals of the verses; Zammuto found a new groove for the chorus, bringing the disparate parts into sync. The band's own songs were even more convoluted, with computerized loops and shifting meters, often using five-beat and six-beat structures. Sean Dixon's brisk, jazzy drumming might scurry two or three times as fast as the bass part from Mike Zammuto, Nick's brother. Gene Back sometimes picked pinging staccato guitar patterns, hinting at African pop, to mesh with Mr. Zammuto's rhythm guitar. Parts that started out played by hand were turned into loops, and while sampled drumbeats were mixed with live ones, Mr. Dixon played not only trap drums but little bell melodies. The layers built up. Amid all the crosscurrents, Mr. Zammuto's vocal lines found a way to sound reflective, with a plaintive high tenor - Mr. Simon tinged with TV on the Radio - that he sometimes ran through extreme Auto-Tune effects or a harmonizer. Mr. Zammuto sang more enigmas than answers; thoughts on language, alienation, uncertainty and futility, pulling against the music's virtuosic neatness. As with the Books, the songs were sometimes paired with videos. The clips were tours de force of editing, with every quick cut matched by the band's music. They added a contrasting layer of silliness to all the brainpower of the music: stunts for a fingertip-size skateboard, silhouettes and photos of people doing not dance moves but headache and backache postures. For a show-offy finale, there was an instructional video on playing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" on Autoharp, sped up to superhuman, machine-gun strumming with stuttering edits. The band gleefully matched every shifting meter. All the gadgets weren't working on Monday night. Mr. Zammuto was unable to get a laptop or a backup laptop to play the essential synthesizer line of a song from "Zammuto." But the band had a substitute: the Books's "Smells Like Content," a thoughtful and polysyllabic ballad. The vocal line initially multiplied the speed of the guitar - which caught up - as the lyrics pitted "an overarching paradigm of clarity and accuracy" against "an overbearing feeling of disparity and disorderliness." Mr. Zammuto hasn't changed his mission, only his backup.