For the Januaries, the Time Is Now

The bands attracted to L.A.’s tiny pop scene often are so devoted to their chosen bygone eras that they appear stuck in time. But a few, such as the Wondermints and the Negro Problem, take a fresh approach to combining retro styles. Now there’s a new name on the list: the Januaries.

The group has earned critical praise and a local following for its dynamic live performances and its self-titled debut album, a frothy, 21st century pop-rock cocktail that whips together ‘60s go-go, Brazilian rhythms, new wave, jazz and electronica, all spiked with singer and lyricist Debbie Diamond’s piquant romantic tableaux.

They may make smooth ‘n’ creamy music together, but spend an hour with Diamond and Januaries co-leader Rick Boston and you’ll begin to wonder whether they would even be friends if they weren’t in a band together.

Blunt and effusive, Diamond, 33, blurts out whatever confession or criticism comes to mind. The wry, intellectual Boston is more reserved. During lunch at a trendy Los Feliz diner, they bicker affably over almost everything, like some rock ‘n’ roll combination of George and Gracie, Lucy and Ricky and Laverne and Shirley.

They crafted their music’s distinctive blend in part to accommodate each others’ tastes. “I wanted it to be more ‘60s, but Rick wanted to go more in the Stan Getz realm of it, the bossa nova,” says Diamond.

A Pasadena native who now lives in Echo Park, she spent the late ‘80s and early ‘90s playing grotty underground clubs with noisy bands such as Pink Fuzz and Magpie. Her turn toward a more cinematic, melodic approach started in the mid-’90s, when she moved to New York and hung out at then-popular go-go dance club Vampyre Lesbos.

“I wanted to put together a band that looked like Jonathan Fire Eater but played good songs,” she says, referring to the photogenic indie darling that was hotly pursued by major labels in 1996. Three years ago this month, she and multi-instrumentalist/producer Boston formed their unlikely partnership after being introduced by a mutual friend.

“Ironically, we’ve come out of the alternative-music period, where everything was anti, and you had to prove how anti you were,” says Boston, 42. “You learn to disguise your musicianship.”

The soft-spoken Canadian, who has lived in L.A. for 20 years, did a lot of that with his last band, early-’90s alt-noisemeisters Low Pop Suicide. But Boston, whose day job is making music for film and television, also is fascinated with mutated beats and trip-hop artists such as Tricky, as shown in his songwriting and production work on Rickie Lee Jones’ electronica-flavored 1997 album, “Ghostyhead.”

Diamond and Boston quickly piled on the influences: Astrud Gilberto, Chet Baker, Blondie, Brasil 66. They rounded out the group with keyboardist John Nau, horn player Mitch Maker, bassist Danny Dunlap and drummer Petur Smith (who was recently replaced by Don Potruch). During gigs at the Viper Room, the Troubadour, the El Rey Theatre and the Three of Clubs, the Januaries’ sensual, psychedelic grooves attracted nearly as much attention as Diamond’s slinky, theatrical moves and husky vocals.

“I sound better than when I was in my harder bands,” she says. “I never really was good at the whole hard-singing thing.”

Now she coos, yelps, purrs and growls her way through tunes that offer intriguing twists on familiar territory. “Every album is somebody’s personal love-affair problems,” says Diamond, who briefly dated Boston while they were writing songs. “I didn’t want to do that.”

Her lyrics on “The Januaries” (released by the Los Angeles-based independent Foodchain Records) do focus on romance, but she imaginatively blends her experiences with pure flights of fancy. “Summer of Love” is the playful result of her desire to write from the perspective of “a female Muhammad Ali.”

The sad faux legend “Love Met the Devil” came to her one rainy day in Boston’s old Echo Park apartment, “near where the Hillside Strangler used to dump the bodies,” she says. She combined the feeling from that afternoon with an urge to write her own myth, envisioning God creating Love to be his beautiful companion, then banishing her when she falls for Satan. “That’s why no one ever really, truly falls in love,” she says, “because Love is outside of heaven.”

Diamond notes that a few people who knew her from earlier bands have been surprised by her new direction. But who wants to play the same old chords forever?

“We’re all growing up,” says Boston. “We don’t necessarily need to smell urine and beer anymore to feel like we’re engaged in the real thing of life. I’m OK with a clean bathroom now. I’m over my fear of that.”

A LITTLE HELP FROM HER FRIENDS: What do Lou Barlow, DJ Nobody, Nels Cline and Petra Haden have in common? All these L.A. luminaries, along with other acts, will be supporting the oddly endearing singer-songwriter Mia Doi Todd during her residency at the Fold at the Silverlake Lounge, every Wednesday in February.

A familiar figure at such underground crucibles as Spaceland, Todd, 25, makes a whimsical impression, a soft bucket hat obscuring her eyes as she strums her acoustic guitar. In a voice that vaguely recalls Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico, she sings impressionistic emotional vignettes that sorta-kinda evoke “4-Track Demos”-era PJ Harvey.

The Yale-educated Silver Lake native knows Cline and Haden (joining her Feb. 21) from the local music scene, and she is working with the avant-garde DJ Nobody (Feb. 7) on some electronic-oriented tracks. As for Sebadoh co-founder Barlow (Feb. 7), she says, “He and his wife were fond of my first album, and we became friends three or four years ago.” She opened some East Coast shows for his current band, Folk Implosion, and sang backup on the group’s latest album.

Todd will perform solo at some of the gigs, but for others she’ll have a band, featuring members of local group Syncopation. Along with older songs and outside material, she’ll offer selections from her new album, “zeroone,” her third release and the first to be put out by her own label, City Zen Records.

* Mia Doi Todd, Wednesdays in February, at the Fold at the Silverlake Lounge, 2906 Sunset Blvd., L.A., 9 p.m. $8. (323) 666-2407.