Los Abandoned are alone no longer

This Battle of the Bands became a pitched war of decibels. Some of the entries, representing the best of L.A.’s busy Latin alternative scene, played as if volume and aggression would impress the judges last month at House of Blues in West Hollywood.

But when Los Abandoned took the stage, the third of four finalists, the club fell quiet. At the center of the unique quartet stood a demure vocalist known as Ladysinger, dressed in a homemade costume fancifully patched together with ribbon and grommets from a thrift store. She was like a Latin Cyndi Lauper, tame and traditional save for the teasing slit up the side of her skirt and petticoat.

She started to sing the opening bars of the wistful “Ojos,” her voice high-pitched, pure and deceptively fragile.

The only accompaniment: simple, sorrowful chords from her own ukulele.

When the voting was over, Los Abandoned walked away with first place and a promised recording contract from EMI Latin in the annual contest sponsored by the magazine La Banda Elastica.

Los Abandoned won out not with brute force but with finesse.

Less than a year old, the group has impressed fans with fresh songs and a flair for being different. Those qualities caught the attention of the magazine’s editors when they heard the band’s “demotape” EP as they weeded through hundreds of submissions for the competition.

The songs are written by the group’s founders, Ladysinger (Pilar Diaz) and guitarist Don Verde (David Green). They are a whimsical mix of paranoid romance (“Stalk U”), cultural schizophrenia with a reggae-punk beat (“Me Quieren en Chile”) and the shock of relationships failing like a power outage (“Electricidad”).

Their CD offers a melodic pop-rock blend, described on the band’s Web site as a cross between Blondie and Mexico’s acclaimed Cafe Tacuba.

They make an odd couple as a songwriting team.

Ladysinger was born in Santiago, Chile, has studied yoga, traveled to Bali and trekked through Patagonia. Don Verde was born in L.A. and has stayed close to home. Their affinity, they say, is rooted in a shared neurosis and sense of humor. They are both products of broken homes and busted bands. When they started collaborating two years ago in Don Verde’s basement, they were both brokenhearted over the breakups of their previous groups.

Hence the name Los Abandoned.

After recruiting a bass player and drummer, Los Abandoned made its live debut last April. Today the quartet includes Vira Lata (Moises Baqueiro) on bass and Gringo Estarr (Garrett Ray) on drums.

Don Verde calls it “the perfect convergence of elements at a particular time.”

The quartet has chemistry, agree the co-founders.

“You can have the best songs in the world and the best performances in the world, but if you don’t have a captivating centerpiece ... “ Don Verde says, without completing the obvious thought. “I’m not saying she’s just a hottie. She actually communicates with an audience.”

Ladysinger cites a wide range of bicultural influences, from L.A.’s X to Blondie’s Deborah Harry to Chile’s Los Prisioneros, a daring rock trio that she compares to the Clash. As a child, she recalls a home vibrating with Chile’s rich folkloric music; her mother, who died when Pilar was 12, had a folkloric group and encouraged her daughter to play guitar, sing and dance from a young age.

When Ladysinger was about 10, her family settled in Los Angeles, and her father, Jaime Diaz-Undurraga, a computer analyst, now lives in Sylmar. It was her frequent trips back to Chile that cemented the bicultural sensibilities reflected in her music.

Don Verde didn’t have to go far to cultivate his bicultural side. When a fellow student at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts did a report on Cafe Tacuba, he became hooked on the alt-Latino movement.

One respected teacher, Bobby Rodriguez, director of the school’s jazz studies, expanded his musical vistas even further.

“He was a Chicano,” says Don Verde, “but he was always talking about Caribbean music. For me, that sort of made all of the Americas turn into one place. It melted all those separations real quickly.

“It didn’t occur to me that we could actually pull this off,” says Don Verde of what started as a basement experiment. “We weren’t trying to do something that we could actually re-create. What we came up with is just exactly what we wanted. When do you ever get to say that about something you’re doing? That it’s totally uncompromised?”