Naked Soul Hopes Its ‘Seed’ Sprouts Into a Road Tour : Pop music: The Costa Mesa band plays tonight at the Newport Roadhouse to celebrate the debut of its mini-album.

Naked Soul is one band that won’t run afoul of the truth-in-labeling act.

The Costa Mesa rockers’ debut release, a six-song mini-album called “Seed,” features a meaty, straight-ahead guitar-band attack and earnest, emotion-baring songwriting that forgoes fashionable irony.

“It’s kind of a heavy name,” acknowledged Mike Conley, Naked Soul’s singer-guitarist and main songwriter. “I wonder sometimes if it’s not a bit much. But I think it totally is the philosophy of my writing and what we’re about.”

Conley, a fixture on the Orange County alternative-rock scene since he arrived here 12 years ago from Las Vegas, sings in a ragged, embattled-sounding voice that invites comparison to the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg.

On “Seed,” due out next week on Scotti Bros. Records, he and his Naked Soul mates, drummer Larry Pearson and bassist Jeff Sewell, lament love affairs that don’t work out, daydream about rising above such thorny realities, and hammer those sentiments home with a good, brawny trio attack leavened by pop hooks.

It’s fitting that the EP features a good version of an obscure but very appealing Who oldie, “So Sad About Us,” which exemplifies the qualities of catchiness, heft and plain talk about feelings that Naked Soul tries to embrace. Naked Soul will celebrate the impending album release with a show tonight at the Newport Roadhouse in Costa Mesa, with several other bands, including the Women and Big Drill Car, scheduled to join the festivities by playing 20-minute sets.

Conley makes the band’s credo explicit on such songs as “Crawl,” in which he chides a lover--or could it be himself?--for not facing up to feelings:

Emotional runaway, try so hard to look away

From everything that I feel ...

Come on, tell me what it is you need,

It sets you free. The band members gathered last week to discuss their prospects at a venerable Balboa seafood house that Conley frequents each Sunday. Conley said his regular companion for those weekend gastronomic excursions is Naked Soul’s fetching CD cover girl: his 3-year-old daughter, Alex. After three difficult years of trying, the band members agreed, Naked Soul has finally found what it needs: a chance.

“Seed,” titled with typical earnestness, reflects the notion of new possibilities for the band, Conley said. “This is kind of paving the way for us. This is just the start, this is our seed. There’s not a lot of diverse material, except ‘Crawl’ “--the lone deliberately paced song on a collection of rockers. “It’s pretty much blazing guitars. We wanted it that way. It’s a start.”

Bearing a passing resemblance to Dustin Hoffman, the shaggy-haired Conley isn’t one for detailed confessions about the personal goings-on behind his songs. Asked if there was a personal story behind “Lonely Me, Lonely You,” the band’s catchiest and most forlorn original, he dodged, then weaved.

“It’s about some infatuation or something,” he said. “I can’t say or I’ll get in trouble.” Then he thought about it some more. “It’s pure fiction,” he amended, with a chuckle. Even an earnest fellow apparently can’t discuss everything with openness and conviction.

In their quiet way, Conley, Sewell and Pearson do show a sense of humor in conversation--a lighter side that Conley said he would like to explore in his songwriting.

“I’ve been trying to,” he said. “I always seem to be so heavy, and it gets to be a drag. It’s like nobody wants to hang out with me because I’ve been writing these dreadful” Angst -ridden songs.

Naked Soul already has written much of the material for a full-length album to follow the introductory sowing of “Seed.”

“It’s got themes that are a little lighter-sided,” said Sewell. “But it’s not bad to show your feelings and true emotions, whether it’s heavy or light.”

“It takes a bit off your mind,” Conley said of his penchant for letting off emotional steam in songs. “You get to say what you feel, whether or not people want to listen. I don’t know any other way. If one thing has stayed with me from the punk-rock days, it was being honest, telling the truth. It’s how I’ve always written.”

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Conley’s punk-rock days started in 1979, as singer for the Las Vegas band M.I.A. It wasn’t the most fertile punk-rock scene, Conley recalled: “There were nine of us in Las Vegas, including the crowd. I figured I could find something a little bit better out here.”

In 1980, M.I.A. migrated to Orange County, where there was a booming punk scene. The group picked up some new members and launched an eight-year career that produced three albums and three national tours. Pearson was one of the locals who joined the band; Sewell was a buddy who hung out at M.I.A.’s communal house in Costa Mesa.

After M.I.A. broke up in 1988 (Frank Daly and Mark Arnold of Big Drill Car were also in the final lineup), Conley found himself wondering what to do next. Sewell turned up with a newly purchased electric bass, his first instrument. Conley taught him to play it, and together they began working on new songs.

“I picked it up just for fun, and it escalated,” Sewell recalled. “We liked some of the stuff we played at home and thought, ‘This would sound good with a drummer.’ ” They enlisted Pearson, and Naked Soul was launched in 1989.

Before long, though, the band had changed completely. Pearson got married and dropped out of the band because, as Conley put it, “his wife wouldn’t let him play.” Sewell left the band after an initial buzz about its first demo tape didn’t lead to a record deal.

“It was tough not getting noticed. It put a lot of pressure on the band. We just separated for a while,” said the little bassist, who at 25 is four years younger than his pushing-30 band mates.

Conley found other musicians and kept writing songs, without many nibbles from the music business. Early in 1991, Pearson approached Conley at the Coach House, where Conley was performing in an acoustic duo with guitarist Tony Scalzo. The muscular drummer, now divorced, was free to play again.

“I said, ‘Let’s give it another shot see what happens,’ ” Pearson said. Not long after that, Conley and Sewell ran into each other at a concert in Los Angeles and decided on the spur of the moment to go see a Replacements concert in San Francisco.

“We were all drunk, stumbling around the city,” Conley recalled, spinning a story that Sewell picked up on the beat. “And we said, ‘Let’s play again.’ Mike wasn’t happy with the guys he’d been playing with.” With the original Naked Soul lineup back in place after a year or so apart, Conley said, “it was a lot more focused.”

One record industry figure who had been impressed with Naked Soul’s demos was Jeff Eyrich, a Los Angeles-based producer who had worked with alternative acts including the Gun Club and the Plimsouls. According to Conley, Eyrich heard that Scotti Bros., a diverse independent label, was looking to add an alternative-rock band to a roster that includes “Weird Al” Yankovic, James Brown, David Cassidy and only one other college-oriented rock band, Blackbird.

Eyrich helped Naked Soul land the deal, then co-produced “Seed” with a nothing-fancy approach that the band members agreed was the right one. “I just wanted to bust it out the way we do it live,” Conley said.

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Now Naked Soul is looking for ways to bust its live act beyond Southern California for the first time. The three members all hold regular jobs now--Pearson hefting pipes for a water purification company, Sewell clerking at a record store and Conley tending bar at a Balboa restaurant-nightclub. They are eager to trade those jobs to tour full time, but they first need to find an agent who can get them on the road.

If the band can make the needed business connections, Conley said, “then we’re outta here. We’ve got the van, we’re ready. We’re packed, we’re just waiting for the OK. There’s no better way to live than the back of a van, seeing the world.” The singer-guitarist admitted that touring lost some of its luster for him during his M.I.A. days, but the urge is back.

“It’s funny at the time how rough you think it is being on the road. Then, when you’re away from it, it’s rough not being on the road. I miss it. You’re totally focused on what you’re doing. Nothing else matters except your music.”

Naked Soul, the Women, Big Drill Car and others play tonight at 9:15 p.m. at New Klub on the Block at the Newport Roadhouse, 1700 Placentia Ave., Costa Mesa. $4. (714) 650-1840.