CATCH A WAVE

Though offers were coming from top record companies in L.A. and New York, England’s prized electronic dance label, Deconstruction Records, instead made a U.S. deal for two of its hottest acts with a small company based in Laguna Beach.

Time Bomb Records, run by the Offspring’s manager and former A&M; executive Jim Guerinot and distributed by BMG, is planning to release albums by Lionrock in July and Death in Vegas (which has been getting a lot of play on KCRW-FM as an import) in September.

Deconstruction general manager Pete Hadfield says he was tired of having to explain to executives at the big companies what this music was about.

“It takes so much time to re-educate whole series of people [at the big labels],” he says. “But [Guerinot] already gets it.”

Guerinot, who says he’s not a big fan of most of the new electronic-based dance music, was drawn to these acts and looks forward to the challenge of building markets for them here.

“I normally give people hell for signing things like this that seem to be just for the moment,” he says. “But these guys have songs and melodies that go beyond the bip-bip-bip-bip of most of this music.”

Time Bomb, which has been fairly quiet since forming last year, has several other new projects in the works, including an album by Bay Area rock band Tenderloin (which was previously on Quincy Jones’ Qwest label) and a debut from Hecate, a trio of Australian women who also run a “rock ‘n’ roll high school” to teach girls how to survive in the rock world.