Just Play the Music

There’s a new brood of Brits knocking at the USA’s door--this one striking a more hat-in-hand than in-your-face stance. Maybe they noticed that the old rock-star arrogance didn’t work for Oasis and company, who were recently sent packing by young Americans who apparently preferred their hooliganism home-grown.

So here they are, winsomely tugging at America’s sleeve: Coldplay (the sudden, out-of-nowhere front-runner), Travis, Gomez, the Stereophonics; most of them on or about their third album and all hoping that their tuneful, wistful strains will somehow crack the hip-hop/teen-pop/aggro-rock monolith.

Due up next to swing at the pinata are the Stereophonics, a group of three childhood friends from the Welsh village of Cwmaman and the band with the lowest U.S. profile of the bunch--their last album, “Performance and Cocktails,” sold 38,000 here, compared to 196,000 for Travis’ “The Man Who” and 63,000 for the low-key Gomez’s “Liquid Skin.”

The trio also packs perhaps the brashest attitude of the bunch, stemming in part from its star stature in the U.K., where it headlines stadiums and has sold more than a million albums. Over there, singer-songwriter Kelly Jones is a dark-eyed heartthrob whose moods and moves are tracked by the music press as big news: “Kelly Goes It Alone--Is This the End of the Stereophonics?” blared the cover of the New Musical Express last fall when he did a few acoustic dates.

It wasn’t the end at all, it turns out. The band, minus drummer Stuart Cable for this occasion, is on a brief U.S. acoustic tour (they play the El Rey Theatre on Friday) to preview the April 17 release of its third album “J.E.E.P.” The title is an acronym for “just enough education to perform,” a line from the single “Mr. Writer,” a broadside against music journalists. Jones is a prickly sort, impatient with the sideshow and happy to tweak the ringmasters.

“A lot of those bands did really well and it just didn’t last long,” he says of his vanquished countrymen. “People get fed up with talking about music more than playing it. It’s become an industry where you’re talking about it and marketing it much more than actually creating it, and I think a lot of musicians are starting to get really frustrated with that.”

Avoiding a Record With No Feeling

The Stereophonics’ solution was to bear down on “J.E.E.P.,” adding more voices, arrangement wrinkles and spontaneous spirit to Jones’ brawny, heart-on-sleeve vignettes.

“That was a main goal for the album, just to try to make a record with an atmosphere,” says Jones, 26. “I think a lot of records these days, they start there, they end there and there’s no feeling in between. . . . On the end of ‘Step on My Old Size Nines’ we just kind of fizzled out with a Rhodes piano and a Wurlitzer piano, and we just wanted to keep all that in. It could have easily been a fade, but I like the scruffiness of it all. Seven of the 11 vocals are guide vocals, just because they captured something at the time.”

In other words, markets be damned.

“I think people can only take stuff without feeling for so long. It’s a very young audience that’s buying that sort of stuff, and people are gonna want to start listening to something with a bit more base to it or soul to it. It can only come back the other way, and hopefully when it does we’ll be in the right place at the right time.”

The success of Coldplay and of a mature singer-songwriter such as David Gray, a fellow Welshman, are encouraging, but the challenges are formidable, from the sheer volume of competition to the fact that their U.S. label, V2, is a small fish in the music-conglomerate pond. The group is ready to tour relentlessly, with plans to return to the U.S. in May with a five-piece lineup.

“We’ve just got to keep coming back I suppose,” Jones says. “We know we’re a good live band and we know we can hold our own on any stage with any artist. It’s just a matter of luck and timing. . . . You can’t get bitter or cynical, you’ve just got to keep doing it. Nobody owes you anything and there’s no rule book.”

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* The Stereophonics, with Amy Correia, Friday at the El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., 8 p.m. Sold out. (323) 936-4790.