Having never been pregnant myself, I'm not sure what it is obstetricians are recommending these days for expectant mothers. As little excitement as possible, or business as usual?

Aiha Higurashi, the lead singer of Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, whose baby is due in September, has perhaps been advised the latter, because except for a few songs where her husband, Yoshiki Watanabe, took over the guitar chores, she rocked pretty tough at the band's 60-minute gig at Shibuya Club Quattro on June 12.

Then again, Higurashi's doctor may very well have told her to go easy on the live shows and she just chose to ignore him. Anyone who listens to "Pretty in Pink," the band's new EP or maxi-single or mini-album or whatever (it's four songs), and then watches them play the same songs on stage will immediately come to the conclusion that Higurashi's peculiar talents work better in concert than they do in the studio. Though the songs are well written, the CD on the whole sounds rushed and tentative. And the new video that sets all the songs from their last album, "17," to visuals (including handicam footage shot on their spring tour of the U.S.) seems to be either a label imperative or a gratuitous goof, but either way it's not something you need to view twice.

The group's live predilection was apparent right from the start. Higurashi and bassist Nao Koyama, dressed in what looked like homemade pink-and-orange dresses, sang the first song of the evening, "Hello, Baby, It's Me," accompanied by handheld keyboards and a tape loop. Instrumentally, it was identical to the CD cut, but it didn't sound like it. The singing on the record is breathy with sexual impatience, while at Quattro Higurashi and Koyama alternated between a bored bantering tone and joyful noises that set up the clever keyboard bridge perfectly.

Even the one unarguably great song on the EP, "I'm Crazy 4 U," with its fatback guitar and bass lines and Takaharu Karashima's steadily hypnotic funk drumming, improved considerably as Higurashi unloaded her arsenal of inflections on the word "babe," as well as those jaw-dropping blues outbursts that she seems to own. Less reminiscent of Muddy Waters' (or P.J. Harvey's) shouts than David Byrne's yelps, they erupt unexpectedly every once in a while, revealing a sensibility that's instinctively musical.

It's why her punk sounds like Deep Purple and her Deep Purple sounds like art rock. Few rock artists manage to mix inspiration and calculation so convincingly. As a songwriter, Higurashi eschews standard verse-chorus structures for stiff but open-ended vocal and guitar riffs that are free to wander at will. Like Stephen Malkmus and early Chrissie Hynde, Higurashi makes prickly music that sounds effortless and, no doubt about it, fun to play. The grin that kept working its way onto her face throughout the show, regardless of the specific emotional pitch of the song she was playing, proves that, to her, music -- singing, to be exact -- is a source of pleasure before it's anything else.

In the polymorphously perverse "Rhythm Voice," she sets her vocal chords to an ululating pattern that sounds like it not only feels good but is good for you. Wailing with joy and cradling her swollen abdomen in both hands as the band pumped behind her, she could have been singing a lullaby. Then she made feline sounds and pointed to the ceiling, after which she delivered a short a cappella scat and the band kicked back in for a full-out punk coda while Higurashi whipped her head to-and-fro, destroying the plain-Jane do she'd contrived before the show.

Though Higurashi played what amounts to a single chord on "Count 0 Number 1," the kind of pep rally song that the Bay City Rollers might have played if they'd actually grown up in Bay City, Mich., and listened to the MC5, she played it with such fervent eighth-note intensity that the little tyke in her belly must certainly have wondered what all that racket was about (centimeters from his/her head that guitar was). She thrilled the audience, which was jumping all over itself at this point, by playing the chord to each side of the stage before ceding the song to a heavy-duty bass vamp that allowed her some space to freak out on her own.

Someone in the crowd voiced concern over the strenuousness of her workout.

"Don't worry about it," she said with a smile and took a dainty slug from her water bottle. Still, she left the guitar chores to Watanabe ("Who's he?" somebody yelled rudely; "Yoshiki-kun," she answered dryly) for the next two songs. A technically more accomplished guitarist than his wife, Watanabe nevertheless lacked the plucky urgency that Higurashi's playing has in lieu of chops. He added real fills and bent notes to "Sweet Home," making it a lot more like someone else's songs.

By the first encore, though, she was looking beat; or maybe when you sing a song titled "Coma" you can't avoid looking at least tired. Opening with old-school discordant art-punk guitar and flat declamatory vocals that on record tend to emphasize the forced ennui of the lyrics (Billy Corgan when he was young and still writing enthusiastically about being dead from the neck up), the song eventually settles into a standard hard-rock groove that does a pretty good job of belying the repeated ending refrain. "I'm in a coma," she chirped with gutsy aplomb. Joey Ramone used to get just as excited about the prospects of being sedated.

They finished with Higurashi's requisite teen submission song, "Angel," a Velvets-like strum party wherein the singer alternates "I wanna be your girlfriend" with "I wanna be your whore," though, from where I stood, it sounded like she could have been singing "I wanna be your star."

Not to worry. As Chrissie Hynde, the original punk mom, once sang in no uncertain terms, "You are that."