Brooding Duality Pays Off for Dishwalla

The duality that makes the Santa Barbara band Dishwalla tick can be summarized in two calling cards of the rising group’s career: the sincere, lighthearted pop of the Carpenters and the cynical black humor of Dishwalla’s debut album cover.

The group got its big break with a 20-year-old song by the Carpenters. Fueled by a devotion to the duo’s sweet pop, Dishwalla submitted an unsolicited track for the 1994 tribute album “If I Were a Carpenter”--a bold move for a group without a single record to its credit.

Amazingly, Dishwalla’s version of “It’s Going to Take Some Time” won a spot on the album, alongside such big names as Sonic Youth and the Cranberries.

That led to a record deal with A&M;, and now Dishwalla has become a radio success with “Pet Your Friends,” which has sold about 234,000 copies since its release a little more than a year ago, according to SoundScan.

The album is known for “Counting Blue Cars,” a song that imagines God as a woman, and for its chilling cover photo of a ‘40s beauty queen cavorting with a doe on a leash.

“We found this picture from an old Life magazine cover from 1948,” says lead singer J.R. Richards, 29, as he takes a break from filming a Rock the Vote commercial in Santa Monica. “You could never get away with that magazine photo now. The animal rights groups would probably go out of their minds.”

Dishwalla’s music mixes brooding, squalling guitars, hip-hop beats and moody Roland keyboard--sounds that meander into samples of danceable deep house and Indian sitar grooves.

“I’m kind of a dark-romantic person,” says Richards, who lists Keats and science fiction as his passions. Most of his songs touch on the innocence of children and their inevitable corruption, or juxtapose foreboding imagery against television and cartoon icons. “Charlie Brown’s Parents” refers to the title characters’ garbled voices as a symbol of a communication breakdown. “Miss Emma Peel” explores Richards’ consuming teenage crush on the heroine of “The Avengers.”

When Richards and drummer George Pendergast first met at a Santa Barbara music store in their early teens, their clashes in musical taste didn’t prevent them from teaming up. Accumulating the current Dishwalla roster along the way, they played the same beachy, college-bar scene that spawned Ugly Kid Joe and Toad the Wet Sprocket.

It wasn’t an obvious grouping: Bassist Scot Alexander loved Bootsy Collins’ fat Funkadelic sound, guitarist Rodney Browning honed his chops on classic rock and Brit-pop, Richards dug Queen and New Order, and Pendergast liked the hard metal of Led Zeppelin and Motley Crue.

“We weren’t consciously thinking of what we wanted to sound like,” says Richards, who looks like a cross between a surfer (which he is) and Jim Morrison. “Our main goal was just to try to write songs together. . . . [Recording] engineers told us, ‘You can’t do that. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.’ It kind of freaked us out, but we did it anyway.”

After a year and a half of nonstop touring, Dishwalla (which took its name from a group of roving satellite-dish pirates in India) is now embarking on yet another countrywide sweep, including a Viper Room show. With such a hectic schedule, Richards doesn’t get much time to delve into his dark side.

“I have to live like a priest, which really blows,” he laments. “I can’t drink, I can’t smoke and I’ve got to go to bed early. I’ve got to take showers every day. . . . Celibacy and the whole thing. I don’t even talk the whole day because I’ve got to scream my brains out every night.

“‘It pays off, but it sucks.”

* Dishwalla plays on Tuesday at the Viper Room, 8852 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, 9 p.m. $12. (310) 358-1880.