nfluential 20th century designers Charles and Ray Eames placed function first in their furniture—cast aluminum and welded wire-mesh examples of how purpose can humbly triumph over form. “What works is better than what looks good,” Ray once said, boiling down the couple’s complex ideology regarding aesthetic practicality to a few simple words.

When recording their 2005 debut, Double Dutch, the Eames Era adopted the form-follows-function philosophies of their namesakes. The end result, however, hastily reminded that successfully creating a syncretic mix of functionalism and indie pop is a tricky endeavor. As the Eames theorized, what works also has to please, and Double Dutch’s excessively formulaic intimacy and guitar-heavy structures did everything but. It was the Eames’s iconic 1945 molded plywood lounge chair with the back missing.

For the follow-up, Heroes and Sheroes, the Baton Rouge, LA, quintet still make use of Indie Pop for Dummies, employing the requisite lyrical and sonic marks here and there, but enough successful refitting and reshaping occurs to now regard that debut as mere prototype. There’s a collective verve that went absent from the first album; when darling dahlia Ashlin Phillips queries “Dear Gabby, are you having any fun?,” one imagines the question directed at her mates and all four vigorously raising fists over tussled heads and letting out a yelp of approval.

That palpable energy is a result of the band’s more experimental attitude in the studio this time around. The Eames Era still aptly dovetail a galvanic guitar sound with fetching female vocals—evoking “blonde” era pop bands such as the Darling Buds—but is not opposed to deviating from such a template. The twangy “Copious” is a lolling sway in a cypress porch swing, muffled vocals coming through a grimy screen door, while the busking “Teenage Meth-Head” rubs the skin red with Mountain Goats nettles. “Last To Know” is the Eames Era stumbling upon Architecture in Helsinki’s punchy pop blueprints—boy-girl vocals, handclaps on the chorus, a touch of horn near the end—and ranks as one of the album’s best tracks.

Phillips sounds like she was squirreled away to a bayou outhouse and forced to digest Beat Happening on loop. While Grant Widmer and Ted Joyner’s guitars poke and prod, she remains adorably aloof, an unflappable Buckingham Palace guard being teased by tourists. Any emotion is fickle and isolated: the bottled enthusiasm on the choruses of “Fake Do-Gooders,” the manic, layered vocals during the coda to “NC-17.” Words are more affecting; in “Watson On Your Side,” over harmonized bah-bah-bahs straight from the Mamas & the Papas catalogue and taps of subtle synth, Phillips delivers a backhanded compliment that would make even the recipient smile: “True, I think you’re cute / In a pull-my-pigtails kind of way.”

What ultimately weakens Heroes and Sheroes is the album’s scattered vignettes—bootless, momentum-killing rummage that does nothing but bump the LP’s length to an unwieldy 17 tracks. The lo-fi lullaby “Aluminum Crowns,” the short-changed “Cash Register,” and “Let Me Spin” should have been archived for that B-side compilation a decade from now.

Heroes and Sheroes carried all the pre-release signifiers of being a rather dour Hurricane Katrina record: a much-ballyhooed tale involving the group’s van colliding with a National Guard truck on its way to providing disaster relief, its title culled from a quote from New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, and publicity photos of the five posing waist-deep in what could be construed as syrupy flood waters. Eschewing a formulaic, designer’s approach allowed the Eames Era to cut an album that isn’t bleak and bare in the slightest, but instead springing with polished enthusiasm. A spirited, matured second effort that ranks as one of the top indie-pop records of early 2007.