Tsar, With a Hint of Glam

“If you’re gonna rock, put some lipstick on,” Jeff Whalen says. “Dress up like a wizard. That’s what you do if you’re in a rock band: Wear a damn cape.”

Whalen, the singer for the Los Angeles quartet Tsar, is handing more ammunition to those who apply the adjectives “glam” and “glitter” to the band’s brashly melodic riffs and soaring, anthem-like refrains.

But as far as Whalen, guitarist Daniel Kern, bassist Jeff Solomon and drummer Steve Coulter are concerned, the music on their forthcoming debut album is just rock ‘n’ roll.

“Obviously, there are elements of [glam] in there,” says Whalen of “Tsar,” due out June 13 on Hollywood Records. Such tunes as “The Teen Wizards,” “Calling All Destroyers” and “Silver Shifter” certainly reflect the players’ taste for the larger-than-life drama of glitter rock.

But while that genre’s exaggerated playfulness and sense of excitement are dominant features, the album is also threaded with nuances recalling a wide range of pop stylists, from the Beatles to the Cars to Nirvana.

They may insist that they’re not revivalists, but the members of Tsar still enjoy being old-fashioned about some things. For example, they refuse to reveal their ages--a way of preserving some “mystery” about themselves at a time when behind-the-scenes mania pervades rock culture.

“There are so many documentaries on how [a band] made the video, and how [a band] recorded their album, and everything that was done,” Whalen says. “That takes a lot of the fun out of the rumors that get spread around the schoolyard, you know?”

For the sake of any future historians gathering details for some heir of “Behind the Music,” the members will state for the record that they all grew up in Los Angeles. However, they didn’t meet until attending UC Santa Barbara, after which they went their separate ways for a few years, coming back together as Tsar in 1998.

In early 1999, the group landed a monthlong weekly residency at the Silver Lake club Spaceland, where it quickly built a faithful following. “We were really outside of any scene,” Whalen says. “The other cool bands at Spaceland wanted nothing to do with us. We could’ve maybe gone into the Pretty Ugly Club glam thing, but we didn’t really want to do that.”

The Spaceland residency also piqued the interest of several record labels, but the band felt most comfortable with Hollywood Records’ senior vice president of A&R; Rob Cavallo, who has helmed albums by Green Day and the Goo Goo Dolls, and who produced Tsar’s debut as well.

“He was less about, ‘Hey, there’s a bidding war going on,’ and more about, ‘Hey, you know how to play guitar,’ ” Whalen says. “Weirdly, for a label owned by Disney, [Hollywood] seemed kind of like an indie.”

Whalen notes that the company also felt more stable because it hadn’t been shaken up by corporate mergers. But most important was the band’s belief that Hollywood sees Tsar as viable in the modern pop marketplace rather than in some niche.

The tunes do have enough aggressiveness--albeit in an exuberant, sex-drugs-and-rock-’n’-roll way--to appeal to young consumers. And Tsar is determined to awaken the teen-wizard potential in all those kids who are hooked on the chest-pounding machismo of Limp Bizkit et al.

“We hope the album expresses something inside young people that they’re not getting right now,” Kern says. “It’s great that they’re getting off on all that aggression, but kids have deeper feelings of beauty and love and bigger-than-life things, too.”

Ultimately, Tsar wants to help today’s youth apply a bit of imagination to their rebellion. “There’s more to emotional or spiritual hedonism than a Woodstock frat-riot kind of vibe,” Whalen says. “You can have the feeling of being able to do whatever you want, but focus it toward a higher goal than breaking stuff.”

BE THERE

Tsar, tonight at Spaceland, 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., 10 p.m., free. (213) 833-2843. Also April 28 at Cafe Club Fais Do-Do, 5257 W. Adams Blvd., 10:30 p.m. $5. (323) 932-9034.

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“We hope the [debut] album expresses something inside young people that they’re not getting right now. It’s great that they’re getting off on all that aggression, but kids have deeper feelings of beauty and love and bigger-than-life things, too.”

DANIEL KERN, bassist for the rock band Tsar.