Guitarist Martin Noble may have grown up a fan of shoegazer music, but the band he plays in now doesn't spend much time on stage gazing at its shoes. In fact, British Sea Power is so physical on stage, the band has actually suffered some casualties.

"I'm usually the one doing a lot of the climbing and stuff, but I'm also the one who hasn't had any serious injury."

Noble says during a tour with The Flaming Lips, that band's frontman, Wayne Coyne, warned BSP if the boys keep it up, they're going to get hurt. And he was right.

Hamilton, the bassist, is known to jump up and down with his eyes closed and has fallen off the stage a few times, along with hitting himself in the head with the bass. Noble says on one tour, two of them ended up on crutches.

In January, cornet Phil Sumner dove off the speakers -- and nobody caught him. "He just jumped. He didn't even think," Noble says, "and he still had the cornet in his mouth, so he broke three teeth and got eight stitches in his chin. He's tamed down a little bit, but occasionally you still see him on a top of an amp, and it's wobbling, and you think, 'Oh, God, here we go again.' "

If this makes it sound more like a studio wrestling match than a concert, that's not the case. British Sea Power has the sound to go with all that energy.

The band from Brighton, England, formed at Reading University around 2000 with a deep set of postpunk influences. Noble says of brothers Yan (Scott Wilkinson) and Hamilton (Neil Wilkinson), "They have an older brother who has a massive record collection, and when they were like 13 years old he got them into bands like The Fall, The Pixies, Sonic Youth and Echo and the Bunnymen. I was kind of more into shoegazing and drony bands."

British Sea Power debuted in 2003 with "The Decline of British Sea Power," a record that showed off a jittery and explosive postpunk style that fell somewhere between Joy Division and the Pixies. The record charted in England and landed on critics' 10 best lists, giving BSP a taste of cult success.

Earlier this year, the band released "Do You Like Rock Music?," an epic-sounding third album fashioned far from the comforts of a London recording studio.

"We wanted to make sure we had a good adventure making it, hoping it would rub off on the songs," Noble says.

They started the recording process in a frigid Montreal warehouse with producer Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire), moved to a 19th-century fort in Cornwall, UK, and then mixed it in Prague.

"At the fort we found this broken piano and kind of threw it down the stairs in the song 'Atom.' We used the corridors in the fort as well to capture the big, echoey drum sounds. We also got a cathedral-like sound from recording in a water tower with all these pigeons in the rafters."

They called it "Do You Like Rock Music?," Noble says, because it was simple and sounded like a title The Who might have used. "And it's somewhat jokey, but it touched on how we like to bring other things into rock music, like the subject matter being slightly outside of what you get normally."

That would include Yan's flair for obscure lyrics and unusual historical references in the songs.

"I think a couple of the songs are hard to break down, like 'No Lucifers,' but there are some lines in there that make perfect sense. 'Waving Flags' deals with Eastern European immigration into the UK. It's like the trouble with Mexicans coming over the border. There are always people who get picked on for wanting a better life. The repeated phrase is 'Welcome in.'

"And then 'Canvey Island.' Yan listens to a lot of BBC Radio, which has a lot of history programs. One week there were a lot of floods in England and they mentioned Canvey Island, 1953. He decided to write a song about it. It's just a small story, but it's easy to make parallels to it now."

The anthemic wall of sound, complete with choir, builds on the band's earlier, rougher approach. Some critics have praised the album's "stadium-sized bravado." Pitchfork slapped the album with a sarcastic ranking of "U.2" (of out 10) and said that BSP used Bono's crew as the "primary touchstone" for the record.

"They were just being mean," Noble says. "It doesn't sound like U2 at all. It sounded like he liked one of our early records and it didn't sound like that, so he said we sounded like U2. When that review first came out, there were mistakes in it and stuff that didn't make sense, so loads of our fans wrote in, and they had to change it. For a respected online [site], it seemed a bit childish."