When it's time to ply our trade and get off our dead asses to do an interview, there are a few questions we journalist-types always keep in our bag of tricks for general use, either as sure-fire insights into an artist's inner workings or as space fillers while we comb our notes for the next incisive query.

My favorite stock question is as simple as it is difficult to answer: "What are your five Desert Island Discs?" It's always a thinker. Many ask for clemency--"How about seven?"--and usually, I grant them such small mercies. When you're concocting a tragic, lonely scenario for the sake of some album recommendations, you tend towards pity on your victims. And it's usually worth it, because those albums can offer fascinating insights into the interests and artistic motivations of any creative person, whether you're talking about a writer, a musician or actor.

When I rolled out that stock question for Jennifer Baron and Sasha Bell of Ladybug Transistor, I expected the usual: ten minutes of careful deliberation, followed by a few reluctant and considered answers. Instead, I got a torrent of suggestions and debate, and enough albums to fill up five crates on that desert island--everything from a ska compilation to the Beach Boys' Friends and The Who Sell Out. If they were stranded with only five records on a desert island, they might just be doomed.

"I'd take five mix tapes and I'll tell you a thousand songs that can be on them," suggests Baron. No dice. Gotta be five discs. And no sharing an island so that you can share ten discs, either. You're stranded alone. Sad but true.

And what about a snide suggestion that maybe Ricky Martin's latest should make the cut? "When I slit my wrists with a coconut shell, I'll play Ricky Martin," retorts Bell.

"What about a conch shell? The coconut shell would take a long time," suggests Baron.

It's probably appropriate that both Baron and Bell couldn't imagine living without stacks and stacks of records at their disposal. Their latest studio release, The Albemarle Sound, is a gorgeous slice of pop melancholy heavily drenched in influences from records past. It immediately conjures the term "retro," a label which the band seems absolutely comfortable to wear.

"It's a great compliment to us," says Baron. "I think it's sorta where our heads have always been. Maybe now we're learning how to do it more. I guess when you do an art form, hopefully you learn and understand how to do it better, and to communicate better. You're learning to communicate what's inside your head, what you've wanted to say all along, and hopefully you're getting better at it."

Though it might be easy to dismiss Ladybug Transistor's sound with the simple "retro" label (one label per band works for Entertainment Weekly; why not for us?), a deeper attempt to refine what the band sounds like is a bit more difficult. There's a light Bacharach tone to the music and some of the arrangements, the Byrds contribute their guitar aesthetic on a few tracks, and Gary Olson's lead vocals conjure a laid-back sadness. It's very bright, but sad music.

"I think it has spaciousness to it," explains Baron in her attempt to quantify the Transistor sound. "I know that's an overused word, but there's space in the sound for you to hear the different instruments and the melodies they might carry. But you also understand how it fits into the whole."

"It has a solid fragility to it," adds Bell. "We weave a little web of sounds and you can hear each one, but there are a lot of textures to it. I feel like one of the good things about it is that you can hear all the things that are happening in each song. Obviously we have our musical influences, but I feel like we really challenged our originality and our creative juices in trying to come up with something that was more musically complicated and challenging. It's just more fun that way--we all play different instruments, so you end up writing these very individualized, stylized parts that you play. It might end up sounding kind of retro-arranged."

"I think it has a fragile solidity," quips Baron with a laugh. "I definitely think that's true. There's different things that it may evoke, like different times of year or times in life. Different settings that are important to us, for example."

The specificity of place on Sound is appropriate, considering that the record is named after a body of water near the Marlborough Farms section of New York that the Transistor calls its home. The album was mostly recorded in that home, which also contributes to the powerful sense of location on the album. "I definitely think our surroundings give rise to more of a fantasy world than it really is," says Baron. "It's not just that we named it after a street or after a part in the park. All these words conjure up more than what's literally here on the surface, which hopefully our music does too. It's either this forgotten place or this weird neighborhood, this pocket with the yards and the grain houses."

On deck for the Ladybug Transistor in the new year is some recording toward a possible new album, according to the band's website. You can also order a live record cut in Scandinavia exclusively through the site, fifteen tracks of more Ladybug Transistor brilliance. Fortunately, there are no future concert appearances scheduled for any desert islands. That could prove to be a problem in the packing department.