THE FACT THAT the Feelies came from New Jersey – and complained that driving to Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel gave them headaches – didn’t stop the Village Voice hailing them in 1978 as “the best underground band in New York”.

The Hoboken quartet sounded even less like an orthodox rock group than all the other sexless whiteboy postpunk bands coming out of New York, London, Manchester in 1978. They looked like preppie geeks – or like Vampire Weekend – and sounded approximately like a composite of Wire, Magazine, Dream Syndicate and Orange Juice.

But their sound was bracingly devoid of hooks and harmonies – school of Velvet Underground/Modern Lovers, granted, but with muffled Idiot-Iggy-meets-Edwyn-Collins vocals submerged under rumbling floor-tom rhythms and one- or two-chord guitar drones. You could hardly tell what Glenn Mercer and Bill Million sang about: sometimes they cancelled each other out altogether.

Though the Feelies’ first (Rough Trade) single ‘Fa Cé-La’ was a missing link between the Beach Boys and Television, I never caught the mooted parallels with REM (apart from at odd moments like the overlapping, neo-Byrdsish vocals on The Good Earth’s ‘Two Rooms’). They were one of the most unlikely bands to end up on Stiff, who bemusedly played them Lene Lovich’s hit ‘Lucky Number’ in an attempt to steer them towards more commercial pop. The UK label clearly didn’t grasp the fact that they made Television sound like Van Halen, their nervy inscrutableness manifested in strangely shapeless compositions and impassive lines like “You remind me of a TV show/Well, that’s alright, I’ll watch it anyway…”

Thudding drums and jerky guitars slowly emerge from amorphously ambient intros but rarely build in a conventionally dramatic way. Riffs circle back on themselves or just hunker down into cerebral trance-grooves. A curious choice of cover – the Beatles’ ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and My Monkey)’ – is as nonplussing as anything else on 1980′s Crazy Rhythms. They sound so of the moment they could be a new American band signed to Domino, the UK label that has fittingly reissued Crazy Rhythms and 1986′s The Good Earth.

The Good Earth (sort of exec-produced by Peter Buck) sounds slightly more cohesive – closer to, say, Mitch Easter’s REM productions or even Stephen Street’s work with the Smiths – but the vocals remain opaque and ‘Slipping (Into Something)’ says it all in the splendid vagueness of its title. (The band’s very name hints at the unspecific indistinctness of what they’re all about.)

This is music that can’t really make up its mind whether it’s rock or not. It’s so intent on not being Rock that it almost fails to engage at all. But something pulls you in, keeps you coming back for more.