By the time a friend asked Bill McAdams if the band he'd been fronting for years, the Hi-Frequencies, would back some unknown singer on a doo-wop cover for a project she was working on for Pittsburgh Filmmakers, he'd been thinking of cutting an instrumental album with the band and then quietly packing it in.

	Hi-Frequencies Release Show With: Teen Riot, Forbidden 5. Where: The Rex Theatre. When: 9 p.m. Friday. Tickets: $5 at the door.

"It was all unspoken," he says. "We never really talked about this, but it was kind of getting to that point where we had worked ourselves into a corner with the instrumental thing. We were a good band in search of a frontperson, really."

Enter Jayson Brooks.

As McAdams recalls the day Brooks sat at his piano and sang the Debonairs' "Every Once in a While," "I think everybody in the room, our jaws just hit the floor."

When he'd first heard the Debonairs recording, after all, his first reaction was "Wow, who's she gonna get to sing this?"

But as singers go, Brooks is a natural. And as McAdams would learn after bringing him into the fold, the kid's a natural frontman, too. Women actually scream when he takes off his jacket or loosens his tie. And jaws still hit the floor the first time people hear him sing.

"We were definitely looking for a singer," says McAdams. "And the fact that he was into what we were doing and willing to join our band, it was kind of a no-brainer. But we also considered, if he had something that he had in mind, we would back him up on the side. He was that good. If he wanted to do a soul thing or whatever, we would have been into that, too."

When McAdams first started the band with bassist/wife-to-be Kate Daly, he did all the singing, and the music was closer to post-Modern Lovers garage-pop.

"The songs were more personal maybe, more like self-expression," McAdams recalls. "But once Bill Scully joined on drums, in the summer of '99, because his style was so much more suited to the surf stuff and the instrumental stuff, we really started to go down that road a lot more. I was a reluctant singer but I really had faith in the songs that I had and wanted to perform them, record them and play them. But once we had a drummer who could really play the instrumental stuff well, we just did that so much better. And the vocal stuff became the weaker link."

By 2003, the set was mostly instrumentals with the occasional vocal thrown in for the sake of variety.

As luck would have it, Brooks plays keyboards, so they still do instrumentals, but his vocals lead the charge on "Money Isn't Everything," the band's new album -- and at shows, of course.

"He really upped the ante on the performance side because another thing we really lacked," McAdams says, "was showmanship. Kate is more extroverted, so she kind of brought that to the band before Jayson, but I've always had sort of an ambivalent attitude toward performing. I love to play. But I don't have the need to perform, the generosity you need to be a real performer. I like it when the audience responds, but I could never figure out how to make that happen, how to connect. But with Jayson, he sort of comes from the classic performer style where he really feeds off of it and is able to play to five people in a room and put on the same kind of show as if there were a couple hundred. He has to get this reaction out of the crowd and his job isn't done if that's not achieved. I would be like, well, I played well, why didn't they respond? We did our job, why weren't they dancing? But you have to go beyond that. You have to not only play well and sing well, you have to reach out and make them respond."

With Brooks on vocals, there's a noticeable shift in the way the Hi-Frequencies sound on this latest release. But the music is still rooted in the sound and spirit of the 1960s, from the opening charge of their spirited cover of Chuck Berry's "I'm Talking About You," through "Money Isn't Everything" (a sassy Memphis R&B revival written by guitarist Jason Lizzi), to the understated final cut, Brooks' wistful breakup ballad, "Cleaning House." And half the album's 14 songs are instrumentals.

"Not to get too esoteric," McAdams explains, "but the way I define what I want the band to be is always based on tone, the tone of the instruments. And that's rooted in a '60s sound and limiting yourself to that palette of tones. I see that as a fixed thing. If, for example, our guitar player bought a Big Muff distortion pedal and a Marshall stack and said 'I want to start using this in the band,' that wouldn't happen. Even if we hadn't found Jayson, if we'd found someone who maybe would be able to do the pop stuff better than me, a Colin Blunstone, the band sound would still kind of be the same."

They did find Brooks, though. And McAdams isn't kidding when he talks about him having "really upped the ante," taking the Hi-Frequencies from what had always been a fun night out for surf geeks and '60s revivalists to a point where they could effortlessly hold their own against the best the roots revival has to offer.