On your average Wednesday, at your average bar, or even at your average rock show, you're probably not going to need an extensive astronomy education to have a good time.

While that's probably still the case for this week's Roustabout!, if you want to know what Parallax Project's name means, you might need to step into an Astro 001 classroom first.

"A parallax is like an optical illusion thing," Michael Giblin, the bassist and leader of Parallax Project, said, citing the example of people looking at a gas gauge from different angles.

"The Parallax Project is actually a big thing between observatories that they use to calculate the distance between stars," he said.

The Roust rookies from Pennsylvania are not stiff, nerdy science types, and the band's name is purely coincidental, Giblin said. On the contrary, he said the band is very lively.

"We're very much a live act," he said. "We're very energetic. I love to record and stuff, but I love to perform as well. We take what we record and notch it up a bit."

Giblin's love for recording has realized itself in the form of two studio albums, including the most recent effort, Perpetual Limbo, released on Tallboy Records.

Whereas the second album released is a whole-band effort, the first one started as a solo project and developed from there.

"The first album was supposed to be a solo album," Giblin said. "This version of the band has been around for five years now."

Despite playing the bass for the band, Giblin said he is the principal songwriter. He writes his songs on guitar or piano first, and then he lets his bandmates add to the song.

"I'm careful not to write stuff too complicated," Giblin said. "When I give the song to the keyboard player or the guitar player, they're going to come up with better parts than I can."

Giblin said the band's sound has been influenced by a lot of pop-oriented bands.

"We try to inject a little more of the sort of new wave early '80s," Giblin said. "And I'm a big Clash fan too, so I have a little of the aggression in there."

Giblin has also shown his appreciation for old-school pop rock in his journal about the band's visit to South by Southwest, the annual rock extravaganza in Austin, Texas.

He said he seemed unimpressed by many of the newer bands, however.

"I was surprised by some of the 'buzz bands' that I came across this year," Giblin said. "They all sounded like the Killers and Franz Ferdinand. I was surprised by these older acts. Like, we saw Echo & the Bunnymen, who have been around since the '80s, and they were awesome."

While Parallax Project has played the festival for the past two years, Giblin said he enjoyed relaxing in Austin more than anything else.

"We've turned it into this sort of vacation now," he said. "We'd be in the middle of some big cookout with all these bands, and we'd go, 'Ah, we've got to go play a show in an hour.' "