Don’t get comfortable around them

THE first single off Say Anything’s major-label debut of skewed indie-punk, “Alive With the Glory of Love,” is about having sex in a concentration camp. Over doo-wop harmonies and buzz-saw guitars, the band’s 22-year-old frontman and songwriter, Max Bemis, shouts, “When I watch you, I want to do you right where you’re standing ... right in plain view of the whole ghetto.” When Bemis plays it live, thousands of teenagers in the mosh pit below join him on the song’s bridge, when he sings, “I’ll make you say: Our Treblinka is alive with the glory of love!”

There’s something deeply jarring, almost Ariel-esque about a pop radio hit written by a Los Angeles teenager that finds a common thread between his sexual anxiety and genocide. Bemis’ songwriting scales new heights in making audiences uncomfortable. It got him noticed by J Records, which re-released his ambitious, anthemic indie debut “ ... Is a Real Boy” last year, and created a cult of personality around the singer whose hospitalizations for bipolar disorder threatened to derail his career.

“You have to stay true to yourself even if there’s flaws,” said Bemis. “I’m not embarrassed to be a part of anything. Anyone who ever loved rock music and was told that they were retarded for liking it can identify with Say Anything.”

Although Bemis’ fans may be drawn to his emotional overload, Say Anything’s rise was quite unlike that of most hormonal young rock bands. Bemis, who founded the group with drummer Coby Linder, began writing songs at 14, and independent and major labels alike gravitated toward his massive choruses and scratchy, plaintive delivery. He signed to indie Doghouse Records in 2004, teaming up with “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” composer Stephen Trask for help producing “ ... Is a Real Boy.” Bemis, who played most of the instruments on the album, matched prickly Guided by Voices-inspired guitar interplay and rousing gang vocals with witty, self-deprecating lyrics about his sexual misadventures and the emotional roller coasters that follow. He ends one song howling “I’ll kill myself!” and begins another by catching his cats having sex.

“I’ve always found that stuff funny,” said Bemis. “I find the greatest humor in awkward personal information.”

As bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance became commercial hits, the album was picked up by J in 2005. But its much-anticipated re-release was promptly thrown askew when Bemis’ bipolar disorder, coupled with an admittedly self-medicating drug habit, flared up repeatedly and forced him into a Texas clinic.

“It makes me question things, like the thin line between sanity and insanity,” Bemis said of his disorder. “After I was hospitalized, I wanted them to send me somewhere I could learn to be taught how to deal with it. Simple things like sleeping enough and not isolating myself.”

J RECORDS founder Clive Davis knew of Bemis’ disorder before signing the band. “When my career began and we inherited Bob Dylan, he had his motorcycle accident and we picked up the pieces,” said Davis. “Any plans you make with an artist, you hope they go well, but you don’t not sign an artist because of problems they have to overcome.”

Bemis’ manic depression is something that other artists such as folk singer Daniel Johnston and rapper DMX have successfully managed alongside their careers.

But in a style of rock based on authentic emotional volatility, might Bemis’ mental illness lend an extra edge to his public image as a talented but wounded songwriter?

“It doesn’t shape my personality,” said Bemis of his manic depression. “Ideas of me are thrown around, I’ve had people call me crazy without knowing what the deal is.”

Once Bemis was discharged, the band toured relentlessly and recently finished a stint opening for emo godfathers Dashboard Confessional. “Alive With the Glory of Love” is making inroads on radio and MTV, and the record is selling briskly, even though it’s more than two years old. But as his profile grows and peers like Panic! at the Disco win MTV awards, Bemis’ confrontational, knowingly melodramatic songwriting is ever more divisive. When Tim Kinsella, of the pioneering indie rock groups Cap’n Jazz and Joan of Arc, wrote a scathingly sarcastic editorial in the emo-centric magazine Alternative Press imploring every band inside to break up, Bemis bristled at Kinsella’s cynicism, calling him a “self-hating emophobe” in a letter to the magazine.

“You want the people you look up to to live up to your expectations,” said Bemis. “He said a lot of things that were valid, that a lot of these bands are formulaic. But there’s a lot of passion behind these bands; there’s not that jaded, post-hipster nihilism. [Kinsella] is a fake punk.”

Bemis, who plans to title his follow-up album “In Defense of the Genre,” doesn’t anticipate losing his brutal honesty now that he’s under a hotter major-label spotlight. There will always be cringe-worthy sex and vicious heartbreak, but now that he’s further removed from the turmoil of his debut, Bemis is learning a new emotion -- satisfaction.

“This is a life of luxury,” he said. “I’m still poor personally, but we have a bus and we’re able to afford to pay for anything we want to do as a band. I’m not Travis Barker. I don’t need much to feel successful.”

august.brown@latimes.com

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Say Anything

Where: El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: 7 p.m. Friday

Price: $12.50 (sold out)

Info: (323) 936-4790, www.theelrey.com