Finding their arena

THE sprawling music scene in Los Angeles serves as the backdrop for some pretty impressive music, whether it is played in arenas, concert halls or neighborhood clubs. It’s also the setting for some pretty good stories.

In our second annual Local Music Report, Calendar Weekend takes a look at a handful of artists emerging from the Southland’s nooks and crannies with an eye on bigger stages:

Cold War Kids

Music from somewhere deep

Considering what has happened to them in the past year, it’s hard to picture that not long ago the Cold War Kids had to steal into campus buildings at their alma mater, Biola University, to practice. Imagine what the odd art student must have thought, to run across four scruffy but intense young men banging away on secondhand instruments and making (considering how they sound now) what had to be a palette-shaking racket.

“We couldn’t afford a practice space, so we always drove around with our equipment in our cars -- we kinda felt like we were on tour before we played our first gig,” bassist Matt Maust says. “I remember we were in the middle of a painting room practicing and somebody was there working on their senior project.”

Hope that undergraduate passed, because Maust and bandmates Nathan Willett, Jonnie Bo Russell and Matt Aveiro sure have -- from local curiosity to L.A. favorites to darlings of the blogosphere to the latest signing of Downtown Records (home to Gnarls Barkley), all in about a year and a half.

They did so with relentless work, a special bond that extends even to their manager and tour support and, mostly, with a sound so original and timeless you wonder how it sprang from the Los Angeles suburbs and not the dark, rich loam of the bayou. Equal parts Velvet Underground, spare-as-Spoon indie rock and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack, their parables are as ragged as the characters they immortalize -- a man who’s on death row, an alcoholic father, a poor family -- and as unvarnished as the rawest of emotions.

Willett caterwauls as if from a soapbox at a tent revival; Maust and Russell wield their guitars like poking sticks; Aveiro’s frenetic drumming is supplemented by bandmates banging on anything that’s handy. It’s almost as if the songs are playing them.

They are at a loss to explain it, except that “everything we do is so idiosyncratic, the band wouldn’t sound like this if we didn’t operate the way we do,” Russell says. “The relationships of everybody in this band, personally and artistically, are entwined.”

“Sometimes you see, sometimes you read, sometimes you imagine,” Willett says of his storytelling. “We always write the music first; the lyrics will come when you think about the people or emotions the songs are describing.”

Taking their name from Maust’s website (he is a graphic designer with an impressive portfolio), the Cold War Kids last year produced their “Mulberry Street” EP (named for the restaurant beneath Russell’s Fullerton apartment, where the patrons didn’t take kindly to their practicing) and cemented their status as an L.A. “it” band with a September 2005 residency at the Silverlake Lounge.

Their “Up in Rags” and “With Our Wallets Full” EPs followed, along with a tour itinerary that has seen them crisscross the country four times this year, and their DIY approach made friends everywhere.

Finally this summer, the quartet decided to sign with Downtown (which will release the full-length debut “Robbers & Cowards” on Oct. 10), because, it seemed to them, the New York-based imprint was a situation where “the label serves the bands rather than the bands serving the label,” Aveiro says.

www.myspace.com/coldwarkids

Live: Sept. 30 at the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa.

The Little Ones

Rhymin’ Simon on steroids

They should prescribe the Little Ones for depression. After all, that’s nearly the state founding members Edward Reyes and Ian Moreno were in almost four years ago after their band Sunday’s Best broke up -- no outlet for their songwriting nor relief from toiling, Moreno says, “at a 9-to-5 that just eats away at your soul.”

Now look at them: They’re signed to Astralwerks, playing with three friends and eating fried chicken in their producer’s backyard. And their self-released “Sing Song” EP might have been the single biggest cause of upward mood swings in L.A. this summer, at least until the heat wave broke.

“Playing it is just as fun for us,” keyboardist Greg Meyer says. “That’s our meds. That’s the way it makes us feel.”

How did the quintet find its happy place? First, the members worked with friends. Meyer and Moreno were high school classmates. Drummer Lee LaDouceur dates Moreno’s sister. And bassist Brian Reyes is Edward’s kid brother, nine years his junior.

Then they wrote and rewrote songs, and found a moderately easy-on-the-wallet place to record them: the Burbank garage studio of former Mighty Lemon Drops guitarist David Newton. Finally, they got somebody whose artwork is distinct -- Jesse LeDoux, whose style is recognizable from the Shins’ albums, among others -- to design their EP.

Blastoff. Not bad for a bunch of guys Moreno says were “just true weekend warriors.”

“Somebody would be in tracking and we’d be sitting out here eating fried chicken and drinking beer,” Meyer says, describing the weekly routine. “After every session, we’d jump in the kiddie pool. That kind of stuff makes you feel good about what you’re doing.”

The music, with its sprightly melodies, spirited riffage and gleeful handclaps and shout-alongs, mirrors the manner in which it was made, and Reyes, at 31, still sings with the childlike innocence to hold it together.

Their day jobs (including Moreno’s in the video game industry and Reyes’ in the music industry as an A&R; assistant to Warner Bros.’ Rachel Howard) behind them, the Little Ones are touring this fall to gear up for the re-release (with bonus tracks) of “Sing Song.” A full-length album is planned for early next year.

“I always knew we’d continue to make music. As to at what level, well ... ,” Moreno says, remembering the not-so-fun years. “Now in the background we have this contractual obligation.... I’m a realist; not everybody gets this chance.”

www.myspace.com/wearethelittleones

Live: Dec. 21 at the Orange County Museum of Art

Joe Purdy

Truly the troubadour

As it is with a lot of good singer-songwriters, Joe Purdy lives wherever his songs take him, wherever he finds inspiration. “Traveling feeds it, living feeds it, and traveling feeds living,” the 26-year-old says in a lilt that reveals his roots in the Hickory Creek area of Arkansas. “Whenever you stop for a minute, you make a record.”

That’s not too outlandish a hyperbole -- Purdy, who’s been based in L.A. the past six years, has churned out albums as often as some guys change T-shirts. He has recorded collections of his serene, bluegrass-tinged meditations in six locales (a couple have yet to be released), in a manner many artists would regard as rushed. Many sessions are low-fi, one-take affairs, but Purdy believes songs should be of the moment.

“Sometimes I’ll write a song in the morning and show it to the band in the afternoon,” he says. “We’ll play it twice and then hit ‘record.’ When you nail it that first time, it’s better than love.”

Immediacy, after all, yields maximum emotional effect. On July 5, 2005, his first day ever in New York City, Purdy wrote “The City,” the leadoff track on his new album, “Only Four Seasons,” and a song that earned a spot on the soundtrack to the television show “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Purdy was no overnight success upon moving to L.A. He slogged through the assortment of day jobs -- handing out pamphlets, being a personal assistant, shooting photographs, painting houses -- until “I met a girl who turned me upside down and I sat down at a piano,” he says. “It was my way of sorting through it.... Saves me the trip to the therapist’s office.”

He found an audience for his musings at the Hotel Cafe, the Hollywood singer-songwriter haven. “I was lucky I found a niche of people with the Hotel crew that feel like a family,” he says. “I remember when I did my first record release show, they asked me if I could [draw] 30 people. I said I thought I could ... but for some reason a hundred people showed up. From then on, things were looking up.”

Purdy will join the likes of Cary Brothers, Joshua Radin and Brett Dennen on select dates of the upcoming Hotel Cafe Tour. But his band won’t be surprised if the songwriter pulls them into a studio somewhere for a recording session. “I’ve figured out that I have more fun if I just get the feel rather than try for production quality,” Purdy says. “When we recorded in London you could hear more drums on the vocal mike than you can the vocals. But it’s human, it’s genuine.”

www.joepurdy.com

Live: Oct. 2 as part of the Hotel Cafe Tour, at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip

Custom Made

Five voices, one mission

Custom Made really takes its name to heart -- Sinister Six even went to jail over it. Six, who helped shape the five-MC collective’s brand of grimy and lyrically driven hip-hop, was locked up this year after violating the probation he received for, well, custom-making $100 bills.

It may sound like the same gang-banging story that permeates much of the region’s hip-hop, and though no one in Custom Made denies their street activities, the music that the group produces is unlike any of the typical sounds that have pigeonholed rap in L.A. for nearly 15 years.

The G-funk bass lines that rattle gangsta rap trunks and the uber-intellectual, outer-space lyrics of boho open-mike nights are glaringly absent. Instead, steel-cold samples and impassioned tales from the city’s toughest streets define every note and every word. It’s been that way since the group began recording, even when Custom Made’s youngest members (Scoobs and Element) were barely 14.

“Lil’ Romeo is a gimmick,” says Scoobs, now 19, of Master P’s son. “Lil’ Bow Wow is just a gimmick to sell records; he appeals to the little girls. We’re a true hip-hop story: five kids who grew up together and all love hip-hop.”

After five years and seven independently released mix tapes -- a grind that is a rare route here, but is the modern career path in New York -- Custom Made’s “Sidewalk Mindtalk” was released this week on indie rap stalwart Babygrande Records. Acting as a teaser to next year’s official debut album, “Fresh Out,” the recently released record is a collection of the best songs from their mix tape series and also includes seven new songs.

Although all members deliver lyrics with a seething anger that is seemingly beyond their 26-and-younger years, the members of Custom Made take pride in bringing their own styles to the cold, string-heavy production. Aneek’s flow is aggressive and battle-happy; Bluff is the corner poet; Six boasts of his real-life antics; Scoobs delivers carefree stream of consciousness; Element weaves politics and crime narratives without a line to blur, sometimes to the group’s own detriment.

“It’s Hard” was excised from “Sidewalk Mindtalk” because Element’s verse graphically depicted the MC venturing onto the White House lawn with injurious intentions that involved a paperweight.

“We used to wild out all the time,” Element says with a knowing smirk. “Now, we got to keep it down because we’re signed. We can’t just do whatever we want.”

www.myspace.com/custommadehiphop

Shiny Toy Guns

Just add eyeliner

Shiny Toy Guns play fashion rock, synthetic and moody and sexy and brawny, the soundtrack to every light show that hypnotized you during the Reagan administration, if you were around then. Better that you weren’t, because then when “We Are Pilots” is released in October by Universal Motown Records it will sound downright revelatory.

But even if you can name both of the Boys who manned the Pet Shop, Shiny Toy Guns will sound undeniably catchy. “We thought, ‘Let’s take everything we ever liked, that ever moved us, everything that we ever wanted to do and smash it all into one record,’ ” synthesizer whiz Jeremy Dawson says of collaborating with his Oklahoma boyhood friend, singer and multi-instrumentalist Chad Petree. “It’s not too ‘80s, not too ‘90s, the sound of somebody that’s a rock band and not a laptop band.”

It worked for the Killers, and Shiny Toy Guns, with seemingly inexhaustible energy and a tour schedule that by year’s end will exceed 280 dates (that’s taking a month off to track the album), seem bent on the same kind of commercial success. The quartet’s MySpace numbers -- almost 100,000 friends and more than 5 million plays -- indicate they are well on their way.

“We communicate with our fans; every e-mail gets answered,” Dawson says. “We have help now, but for a long time we did it ourselves. We send them happy birthday [messages]. We talk to them after shows. And we never ask them to do anything, not even call a radio station.”

Dawson and Petree were immersed in electronica when they moved to L.A. in the late ‘90s but, making music as Slyder, they saw the trance scene slip into redundancy. “We thought, ‘We had a good time. Cool. Next,’ ” says Dawson, who turned the duo’s efforts toward songwriting and put his ear to the ground.

“A movement has to start with the listener -- whatever is happening in fashion, world events and popular culture is going to affect what new music is going to come out and take hold,” Dawson says. “I think 9/11 had a role in this; it shook up everything that had to do with life. People turned to the arts, film and music. They wanted to go out and enjoy life.”

The need for catharsis -- along with the iPod Shuffle mentality “that makes it OK to like the Celine Dion track because it’s right here next to your post-hard-core,” Dawson says -- fueled the attraction to Shiny Toy Guns’ club anthems. That the band found a dynamic female singer in Carah Faye Charnow to pair with Petree’s vocals made the band’s confections all the more delectable. “Their voices fit together like icing and cake,” Dawson says.

The foursome (including drummer Mikey Martin) tours in a tricked-out RV, the back of which virtually doubles as a recording studio and allows the band to write while they are on the road. “Our booking agent thinks we’re psychotic,” Dawson says. “But it’s not like we’re out in a field chopping wood all day.”

www.myspace.com/shinytoyguns

Live: Monday at the Henry Fonda Theatre

Freelance writer Brandon Perkins contributed to this report.

kevin.bronson@latimes.com

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10 songs by unsigned artists

Foreign Born, “Union Hall” www.myspace.com/foreignborn

* Glacier Hiking, “Save Some” www.myspace.com/glacierhiking

* Polus, “The Edge” www.myspace.com/polusmusic

* Gran Ronde, “Say Say Say” www.myspace.com/granronde

* Briertone, “Cheers” www.myspace.com/briertone

* Everybody Else, “Rich Girls Poor Girls” www.myspace.com/everybodyelse

* Oslo, “My Soul” www.myspace.com/oslo

* Sky Parade, “I Feel Surreal” www.myspace.com/skyparade

* Loverlee: “When We’re Alone” www.myspace.com/loverlee

* Eyes in Furs, “Walking at Sundown” www.myspace.com/eyesinfurs

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10 more bands you ought to know

Bitter:Sweet

Gorgeous coupling of Shana Halligan’s vocals and and producer-composer Kiran Shahani’s instrumentation evoke the likes of Portishead on the duo’s debut “The Mating Game.”

www.myspace.com/thematinggame

Live: Oct. 8 at Tar Fest

The Briggs

Straight outta Eagle Rock, this hard-working and hard-touring punk quartet keeps it old school, but not too reverential, on its SideOneDummy release “Back to Higher Ground.”

www.myspace.com/thebriggs

Live: Saturday at the L.A. Derby Dolls, 333 S. Alameda St.

Darker My Love

Dense and intense (not to mention good for the earplug business), this Silver Lake quartet blasts off somewhere between stoner rock and shoegaze and orbits at a comfortable drone.

www.myspace.com/darkermylove

Live: Oct. 6 at the Echo

Hellogoodbye

Check your attitude at the door -- there’s a reason this Orange County electropop outfit’s debut “Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!” cracked the charts upon its release. It brings out the high school sophomore in all of us.

www.myspace.com/hellogoodbye

Live: Oct. 14 at Bamboozle Left festival at Cal Poly Pomona

Monsters Are Waiting

Maybe not the strongest singer among the current tsunami of female-fronted bands in L.A., breathy Annalee Fery nonetheless offers a compelling presence for the dark, ‘80s-minded quartet, a constant presence at local clubs this year.

www.myspace.com/monstersarewaiting

Live: Oct. 7 at the Eagle Rock Music Festival

The Outline

It’s maybe a few thousand seats short of arena rock, but the inventive stuff on the debut “You Smash It, We’ll Build Around It” augurs bigger rooms for the L.A. quartet.

www.myspace.com/theoutline

Live: Tuesday at the Troubadour

Los Abandoned

This slow-to-arrive quartet landed with a bang when it released “Mix Tape,” a catchy collection of pop-punk delivered bilingually, and with panache, by tempestuous frontwoman Lady P. Might be the perfect soundtrack to L.A.’s cultural melting pot.

www.myspace.com/losabandoned

Live: Wednesday at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip

The Randies

Sophomore release “Saw the Light” put the retro kitsch of their early songs in the rear-view mirror, paving the way for a full-on rock assault behind the quartet’s trifecta of female vocalists.

www.myspace.com/therandies

Live: Friday at Safari Sam’s

Say Anything

Max Bemis’ pop opus, “ ... Is a Real Boy,” expanded and re-released, is a genre-hopping wonder full of twists and turns that isn’t overbearing with its pubescent defiance.

www.myspace.com/sayanything

Live: Nov. 3 at the El Rey Theatre

The Submarines

The winsome pop of husband-and-wife duo Blake Hazard and Jack Dragonetti tugs the same emotional strings as the best date movie, the kind you leave convinced the couple will live happily ever after.

www.myspace.com/thesubmarinesmusic

Live: Oct. 29 at the Glass House in Pomona

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10 bands on the horizon in 2007

The Binges: Raucous, unvarnished and unaffected, this punk quartet featuring Tokyo-born sisters Mayuko and Tsuzumi Okai figures to make noise, some of it melodic.

The Bird and the Bee: The lush, jazzy collaboration between vocalist Inara George and keyboardist Greg Kurstin promises some warm-and-fuzzies when their debut is released in January.

Ferraby Lionheart: Silver Lake folkie is already gaining an audience for his all-nerves-exposed pop songs.

The Gray Kid: He raps, you move; he rhymes, you smile; he croons, you swoon. Steve Cooper’s self-released “... 5, 6, 7, 8” is hip-hop with an indie-rock sensibility, and he doesn’t figure to be a one-man show for long.

Great Glass Elevator: Theatrical Orange County youngsters are working on a debut that aspires to be as rollicking as their live act.

The Minor Canon: So there might not be much commercial potential in a seven-piece with a horn section, but the music is as heartfelt and inventive as it gets.

Nico Vega: Pipes like Aja Volkman’s don’t come along every day; the trio’s early material flaunts the singer’s Joplinesque stylings.

The Ringers: Straight-ahead, no-frills hedonism with some killer songs, even if the cheese gets thick with lyrics like “I want to be a freak show / in your circus of love.”

The Tender Box: “The Score” revealed a rockin’ quartet not quite sure of its sound, but the debut album is not likely to be the final tally.

Sea Wolf: The blissful, orchestrated folk-pop from Alex Church seems perfect fare for a big indie label shopping for music that can stand alongside the Decemberists, Matt Pond PA or the Shins.

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An L.A. mix CD, 2006

Kevin Bronson, our notoriously indie-leaning Buzz Bands columnist, offers his track list for a songs-from-the-Southland mix. Have a mix of your own? E-mail the track list to buzzbands@latimes.com (’06 releases only; one song per artist).

*--* TITLE ARTIST TIME 1 Lovers Who Uncover The Little Ones 4:12 2 Remain Instant The Sharp Ease 1:59 3 Lightbulb Mezzanine Owls 4:59 4 Well Thought Out Twinkles Silversun Pickups 4:02 5 Hang Me Up to Dry Cold War Kids 3:38 6 Coyote’s Song (When You Hear Nobody & Mystic Chords of 2:54 It Too) Memory 7 Distant Radio Devics 4:54 8 She’s Not Shy Irving 4:35 9 Wait Up for You Run Run Run 2:33 10 Colorguard Division Day 4:55 11 Lonely Love The Gray Kid 4:09 12 Down on the Docks The Lassie Foundation 3:29 13 Underneath the Waves The Twilight Singers 4:28 14 Shotgun The Outline 2:44 15 In the Fields of (Lonely Languis 4:49 Fences) 16 Broken Lines Hello Fever 2:36 17 Kissing the Blvd Gliss 3:55 18 (Don’t) Kill Yourself The Spores 3:36 19 Make Up Friend Agent Sparks 3:14 20 I Win Starflyer 59 3:04

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