It’s about 15 minutes to showtime. The week’s snow has piled up around Nottingham Co-Op, occluding a building that’s already a bit hard to find if you don’t know it’s there. A balcony overlooks Lake Mendota, snow-encrusted glass doors separating the warm ballroom from the endless frozen lake that fades into the darkness of a midwinter’s night.

Inside, guitarist Amber Sebastian is playing her acoustic-electric guitar and singing to a crowd of about 15 to 20 people. The audience lays sprawled across a dozen or so sofas and easy chairs, arranged casually around the spacious entrance hall.

Sebastian finishes a song and takes a step back from the mic, taking a sip of her beer as the audience applauds. She turns to drummer Sara Wexler, gesturing to signify “Should we go on now”?

“It’s not quite 9:30. Maybe a couple more songs,” Sara replies.

Sebastian nods and returns to the mic. “Anyone out there know any songs? Come on, I know somebody knows a song.”

One of the audience members steps up and takes Sebastian’s guitar as she takes a seat, preparing to headline the show she just opened for. Two songs later, someone shouts “THE DRUNKEN LOVE BARNACLEEEES!” as Wexler and Sebastian take the stage. Their bassist, Brandon Madsen, is out of town for the evening, so the two decide to tackle the show as a duo.

Not that his absence ends up being a hindrance at all. For the next hour, the room’s filled with with music that’s hard to pin down. Just like how Sebastian plays a thin acoustic-electric hybrid, the sound is akin to a folk-tinged punk. Songs can draw equal parts from the angstiest of ’90s alternative and the sappiest of love ballads. It’s a sound that straddles genres without sounding forced.

That comes from the conveniently clashing musical tastes of Sebastian and Wexler. These coworkers-turned-bandmates found that while they both loved to play music, they musically didn’t have a whole lot in common.

“We really didn’t have a similar taste in music,” Wexler said. “We just both played instruments and decided to start playing together.”

Anyone who has tried to form a band out of convenience before knows that a lot of the time, this approach can lead to butting heads, disjointed songs and overall disaster. Other times, like with Drunken Love Barnacles, the genres blend a little smoother.

Possibly the highlight of the night’s set was the band’s rendition of David Gray’s “Please Forgive Me,” a song that once held the dubious honor of briefly appearing during a tender moment on the pilot episode of “Scrubs.” Sebastian claims its one of her favorite love songs of all time, but for this one she cranks the gain a bit on her amp, creating a delightful contrast to her sweeter, more cleanly-delivered vocals.

Wexler brings in a d-beat drum groove that kicks the tempo up a few dozen beats per minute. The result is comfortably in the realm of pop punk: An uptempo, bouncy jam that got the previously sedentary crowd dancing and howling around the spacious atrium.

Many bands have found a home at Nottingham Co-Op. Originally built as a fraternity house in 1927, the building became a housing cooperative in 1971. It has since become notable for hosting both up-and-coming and established musical acts, all free of charge. Sebastian has literally made the Co-Op her home, using her residence there as a springboard into Madison’s music scene.

“Living at Nottingham gave me a really wide range of social connections,” Sebastian said. “It’s been pretty cool to get to know a lot of local Madison musicians.”

Drunken Love Barnacles themselves practice in the deep darkness of the building: The subterranean cellar known colloquially as “the dungeon.”

Digging deep into the ground, the dungeon is sequestered away in a soundproof concrete corner, past the basement kitchen and utility room. The walls are scrawled with graffiti, a record of the bands that have practiced there and their respective condensed personal philosophies. All this is sealed behind a metal door bearing a list of words in black spray paint.

“Upstairs, you really can’t hear any sounds made in the dungeon,” Wexler said. “So that’s kind of creepy.”

The dark dungeon serves as a sort of Frankenstein’s laboratory, giving the band a place to piece together their incongruous musical styles into a smooth hybrid. Of course, the crowds gathering after them tend to raise their lighters, rather than torches and pitchforks.

“We usually just jam. We start playing and see how it goes. I’ll just start playing something,” Sebastian begins.

“Then I’ll come in with something,” Wexler adds. “We’ve got a crappy little recorder so we can go back and kinda see what works.”

The result is music that feels naturally right, compositions coming together organically rather than mechanically. The same approach goes into the group’s selection of covers, and it’s usually not until you go back to the original recording to discover that The Cranberries’ “Zombie” didn’t have the same kinetic drumming and acoustic-punk energy as the Barnacles version.

Bands like Drunken Love Barnacles are like a microcosm of the Nottingham Co-Op that in a way birthed them: Individuals with common goals, but not necessarily common ground, come together and create something that works perfectly. Everybody’s doing their own thing, but they’re doing it together. For Drunken Love Barnacles, the result is a genre-straddling duo (or sometimes trio) that manages to be cohesive and unique without being obtuse and pretentious. A rare thing indeed.