Rarely has a debut album sounded so fresh and endearing — without your suspecting the writer copped somebody’s songbook — as the Morning Benders’ “Talking Through Tin Cans.”

The Berkeley-based quartet metes out three-minute dollops of youthful pining as if love songs were something they just sprang on the Internet. “We’re just looking to do something that sounds authentic,” says frontman Chris Chu, an unabashed fan of classic pop who, at 21, appears years away from his first encounter with a razor. “Most of the music I look back on [fondly] has an honest emotion.”

The Benders’ formula of scratchy-but-tasteful guitars, agile melodies and wizened-not-whiny sentiment evolved as if by fate. Chu, a Santa Monica native (in fact, three of the four Benders have SoCal roots), “picked up a friend’s guitar when I was home sick from school one day and started playing,” he says.

Off he went to Cal, where he eventually found Joe Ferrell (guitars, keyboards), Julian Harmon (drums) and, now, Tim Or (who has replaced original bassist David Perales). “After I moved up to Berkeley, I just started writing songs — yeah, I had some girl troubles, but I had some good things happen too,” Chu says. “All the songs are kind of a snapshot of what was going on at the time.”

And to gauge from Chu’s enthusiasm, the album, released this week by fledgling label +1 Records, is just the start. “We love playing music, and so far everything about it is exactly how I wanted it to be,” he says. “We want to make another album already.”

||| Live: The Morning Benders play their album-release show Thursday night at the Echo (free to those who buy the album at Virgin Megastore or at the label’s website). (They will also be back in L.A. on May 19, opening for the Kooks at the Wiltern.)

||| Download: “Boarded Doors.”

||| Watch: The Morning Benders’ new video for “Boarded Doors” is the brainchild of Daniel Stessen, creative director of the L.A. art-film-music collective People Food. Given Chu’s boyish looks, it’s, um, a perfect fit.

Upcoming in L.A.
Speaking of Stessen, he and his People Food cohorts (including the Gray Kid) will perform Saturday night at downtown’s Redwood Bar. … Local psych-poppers the Parson Red Heads celebrate the release of their new EP, “Owl & Timber,” with a show Friday at Spaceland. … And Saturday at Spaceland, Sky Parade marks the release of its new EP,  ”High on Desire,” with a show supporting impressive U.K. newcomers Air Traffic. … The Donnas’ 15th anniversary show Friday at the Viper Room is sold out — as is Saturday’s show at the Troubadour featuring the Duke Spirit, whose new album, “Neptune,” measures up as one of the most solid rock records so far this year. … Electro-poppers Casxio just released a free four-song digital EP (go to their website for the goods) and have a show tonight at UC Riverside (and May 15 at the Continental Room in Fullerton). … With its second EP, “Bloomsbury,” just out, Princeton plays a support slot for Le Switch’s residency on Monday at the Echo. … And it’s a big night in store Monday at Indie 103.1’s weekly shindig at the Viper Room — Everest (its debut “Ghost Notes” just out) and Film School are on the bill.

– Kevin Bronson

Morning Benders photo by Timothy Norris

Aaron Kyle sings as if he’s never five minutes from his last whiskey, or five minutes from his next, occasionally lurching into a down-deep growl you wouldn’t think could come from an angular white dude in a collared shirt and old browline spectacles.

But it’s that voice, and the woeful tales it conveys, that have endeared L.A. fans to the distinctly vintage soul-pop of Le Switch. “We’re not the fashion police,” Kyle says. “I think if you write a good song, people are going to respond, no matter whether it’s gonna end up in Vice magazine. Besides, I’d trade soul for cool any day.”

There’s plenty of that on “We Are Le Switch,” the debut album due this month on Autumn Tone Records (a local imprint run by Justin Gage, the man behind the Americana-leaning blog An Aquarium Drunkard).

Le Switch’s sound, which nods to the likes of Leon Russell, Dr. John and Randy Newman, first began to take shape when Kyle fell in with drummer Joe Napolitano in 2005. Maria DeLuca (trumpet, viola, vocals) joined next, and by the time keyboardist Josh Charney and bassist Christopher Harrison had come on board, Kyle was eager to “make the Leon Russell or Harry Nilsson album we wanted to make,” he says. “Everybody in this band listens to a huge assortment of ’60s and ’70s music — there’s not a lot of new music I can drive with.”

||| Live: Le Switch plays every Monday this month at the Echo.

||| Download: “Pristine.”

Photo by Charlie Chu

Five more L.A. residencies you’d do well to see this month

Mezzanine Owls, whose noisy pop suggests the unlikely collision of Jeff Buckley and Ride, play Mondays at Spaceland. Download: “Snow Globe”

Local six-piece Castledoor is honing (and maybe even adding a bit of edge) to its contagious indie pop every Monday at the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa.

Party-pop trio Porterville does Mondays at the Silverlake Lounge.

Gran Ronde, the local post-punk quartet whose debut, “Secret Rooms,” came out this spring on Filter, rocks out Tuesdays at Spaceland (and, just to pile up the miles, Thursdays at the Beauty Bar in Las Vegas).

And Camp Freddy — five famous dudes (Billy Morrison, Dave Navarro, Matt Sorum, Donovan Leitch and Chris Chaney) who like to remind you why they’re famous — demonstrate on Thursdays at the Roxy why they might be the best cover band ever. Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath is joining them this month, and last Thursday’s first installment of the residency featured guests such as Lemmy Kilmister, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Poe and Nuno Bettencourt. That’s some guest list.

– Kevin Bronson

It isn’t as if fans at the Silverlake Lounge never heard an epic guitar solo, but some were surprised on a recent weeknight to see Oystein Greni’s — played after he hopped atop the bar at the Eastside club. “We’re from Scandinavia; we’re allowed to be weird,” the singer-guitarist for the Norwegian trio BIGBANG says good-naturedly.

Not that the band’s roots in Oslo — where they were stationed for six albums over the last decade-plus — have given them much else in the way of traction. Greni and bandmates Olaf Olsen and Oyvind Storli Hoel moved to L.A. in September and “got severely punished,” the frontman says from his Echo Park home studio. “It’s like going to a weird school. You’re so naive and blue-eyed. … There have been many people here who talk so much and do so little — it seems you can make a good long career out of eating lunch, drinking coffee and talking to people.”

Still, the trio that played to thousands in their homeland remain undaunted, releasing their “Wild Bird” EP, paying dues in small clubs and readying the September release of their debut U.S. album, which will mix new material with old. Therein lies another hurdle. BIGBANG’s sound could loosely be described as classic rock played with skate-punk ferocity, but comparisons are all over the map: the Allman Brothers, Bad Company, Rush, the Byrds, to name a few.

“Most American bands are very aware of their demographic, and we’ve never worried about playing to a specific genre,” Greni says. “I love all kinds of music … and a good song is a good song.”

||| Live: The trio plays tonight at Crash Mansion, Wednesday at the Silverlake Lounge and Thursday at the Viper Room’s pre-Coachella party.

||| Download: “Wild Bird” from the trio’s EP of that name.

– Kevin Bronson

Photo by Jan Erik Svendsen

The Airborne Toxic Event, whose danceable, literate rock-noir captured the fancy of L.A. audiences (and radio programmers) over the last year, has signed with Majordomo Records, the indie imprint affiliated with the burgeoning reissue/DVD label Shout! Factory.

The Los Feliz-based quintet, which will release its debut album, “The Airborne Toxic Event,” on July 15, becomes Majordomo’s second signing. The label debuted in August when it released Earlimart’s fourth album, “Mentor Tormentor”; on July 1, the label will release Earlimart’s follow-up, “Hymn and Her.” Although Majordomo is new to the new-release business, its products have major-label distribution through Sony BMG.

“At the end it just felt like Majordomo were the smartest kids on the block,” says Airborne frontman Mikel Jollett, whose band was courted by labels big and small. “You look at it, and you think it’s a new venture, but there is a lot of experience in that room. … They came in with the smartest, most aggressive offer.”

Airborne’s album was made in the Eagle Rock studio of fledgling producer Pete Min, a friend of the band. It will include reworked versions of the three songs on the band’s self-released EP, as well as the single “Sometime Around Midnight,” which vaulted into regular rotation at radio outlets such as KROQ-FM (106.7) and Indie 103.1 (KDLD-FM).

The band has been slotted to perform on “Last Call With Carson Daly” on Tuesday, and has several festival dates lined up for the summer.

– Kevin Bronson

Photo of the Airborne Toxic Event by Jeff Koga

The steely, smoky tones in which Sara Lov narrates the rapturous songs on her debut, “Seasoned Eyes Were Beaming,” hint at old wounds viewed through new resolve. For Lov — and yes, that’s her real name — it’s the sound of a thirtysomething finding her own voice while Dustin O’Halloran, her longtime collaborator in the L.A. band Devics, advances his solo career.

“When Dustin started having all these great things happen with his career, I thought, ‘Maybe I should do something myself,’ ” Lov says. “I feel confident as a singer, but I don’t feel like I have a lot of vocabulary musically.”

While Devics’ albums and their Mazzy Star-like shimmer resonated with burnished textures and what Lov calls “Dustin’s complexities,” her own material keeps it simpler “and maybe a little bit darker,” relying on experiences and images culled from a high-mileage life. Lov was kidnapped by her father at age 4 and lived in Israel and then Minnesota until landing in L.A. at age 12 to be reared by an uncle. She met O’Halloran at Santa Monica College, and after Devics was signed to the Bella Union label by the Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde, the duo spent several years in a small town in northern Italy writing and recording their 2003 album, “The Stars at Saint Andrea.”

It was in Italy, where Lov kept an apartment until recently, that she first penned “a few tunes that didn’t feel like Devics songs,” she says. When O’Halloran’s “Piano Solos” gained traction (and earned him a slot as tour opener for k.d. lang), Lov began flushing out more songs, with the help of producer-multi-instrumentalist (and sideman for the likes of Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette and Gnarls Barkley) Zac Rae.

“He’s done it as kind of a labor-of-love-type thing,” she says. “I’m very lucky that a lot of really great musician friends have come in and played on the record.” Release plans for the album are uncertain. “I’ve learned not to have too many expectations about that sort of thing,” she says. “I’m just happy that I made something that I feel good about.”

–Kevin Bronson

||| Live: Lov is playing tonight, and the remaining Wednesdays in April, at Tangier.

||| Download: “A Thousand Bees.”

Just think of the Ruby Suns’ sound — an arrestingly wide-ranging palette of psych-pop, island flavors, Asian exotica and traditional African music — as influenced mostly by frontman Ryan McPhun’s dual citizenship.

McPhun, 25, was reared in Ventura, the son of a Kiwi father and an American mother, a fan of bands such as the Beatles, Sloan, Jason Falkner, obsessive about the Beach Boys and Nirvana, “and a little bit too shy for a lot of the emo and hard-core stuff” that was popular with his friends, he says.

Off McPhun went to New Zealand, where after a short stint at university, he traveled the world and settled in Auckland. He fell in with pop artists on Kiwi indie label Lil’ Chief and played with the Brunettes and the Tokey Tones while finishing up his own album, a 2005 Beach Boys paean released under the rhyme-alicious name Ryan McPhun & the Ruby Suns.

“Some of the songs I had written before I moved, but I was changing very quickly,” he says. “I started getting into less straightforward stuff … other music from all over the globe. I became less worried about style and more concerned with rhythms and earth sounds.”

That’s reflected on the Ruby Suns’ sophomore album, “Sea Lion” (a March release in the U.S. on Sub Pop), whose miasma of instrumentation, sweet melodies and sounds found in places like New Zealand’s South Island, southern Africa and Thailand make for meditations that border on hallucinations.

“It’s a very broad album,” McPhun says. “Geographically speaking.”

||| Live: The Ruby Suns perform with Le Loup and Princeton on Saturday at the Echo.

||| Download: “Tane Mahuta”

||| Download, from the Ruby Suns’ debut album: “Look Out SOS!”

Photo courtesy of Sub Pop

– Kevin Bronson

No word on which day he will crash the party, but Prince will be added to the lineup for the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, which runs April 25-27 at the Empire Polo Field in Indio, sources tell me.* No confirmation from the artist’s websites, which seem to be down (or under construction) at the moment. But this certainly adds some meat to the the festival’s slightly protein-starved roster.

Goldfrapp and Aphex Twin were recently announced as additions to the lineup, as well as Serj Tankian, Redd Kross, Kate Nash and Adele (update: Adele, according to Goldenvoice, “is no longer performing.”)

Only 37 days until the desert.

– Kevin Bronson

Photo: L.A. Times files

*Correction: Coachella co-producers AEG Live have responded to this post. Brandon K. Phillips, CEO of AEG Live, writes in an email: “Paul Tollett, the head of our Goldenvoice division and our partner in the festival, just called to tell me that the LA Times put on their blog that Prince was playing Coachella. This is absolutely not true… Regardless of what the Times was told, there is no commitment from Prince to play Coachella.” Stay tuned…. this is the Purple One we’re talking about, so anything could happen.

UPDATE 4/9/08: Prince to play Coachella

The lookie-loos Monday night on the Sunset Strip probably thought another installment of “Back to the Future” was in the works, what with the two sleek DeLoreans parked in front of the Viper Room. Drivers  slowed to snap photos from their cars, and club patrons hopped in to get their pictures taken.

But the real story was inside the Viper Room, where Neon Neon was playing only its fourth live gig in support of today’s release of “Stainless Style.” It’s a concept album chronicling the life and times of engineer-entrepreneur-playboy John DeLorean in smart, neo-’80s dance-pop songs.

No surprise that the album succeeds; it’s a side project of Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys and L.A.-based producer Boom Bip, and it features vocal contributions from Cate Le Bon, Naeem Juwan from Spank Rock and Yo Majesty. But studio ventures — and especially side projects — have a habit of getting messy when the music is finally staged.

There were some rough edges Monday, but not anything you’d think was a mess. Rhys, fully backgrounding most of the songs for the almost-full house, presided calmly over the proceedings, which included tight disco numbers and bouncy guitar pop rendered tightly — if a little short of full throttle — by a five-piece band comprised of Rhys, Boom Bip, Le Bon, guitarist Josh Klinghoffer and drummer Eric Gardner. With the hip-hop contributors absent, Har Mar Superstar stood in as rapper, and his kitschy showmanship applied a deserving smile to the end of the evening.

“Stainless Style” might end up merely being fodder for iPod DJs, or maybe it signals the birth of a new band. One thing for sure: It’s nice to see electro in the hands of real musicians.

– Kevin Bronson

Photo: Gruff Rhys (left), Boom Bip, Cate Le Bon and Har Mar Superstar feed the meter on Sunset Boulevard. Courtesy of Mark Sovel / Indie 103.1

[The post-South by Southwest tsunami of bands is headed toward Los Angeles, beginning tonight. Here are quick first impressions of albums from two of them — and, really, wouldn’t we all want to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a guy named Rocky O’Reilly?]

Neon Neon, “Stainless Style” (Tuesday, Lex Records): Out of the brine of this era’s dancefloor vacuousness comes … an electro concept album? Sleek disco, hip-hop lite, fuzzy guitar pop — this collaboration between Super Furry Animals main man Gruff Rhys and L.A. electronic guru Boom Bip has a little bit of everything, including a story line: The album traces the life of auto magnate and hard-partyer John DeLorean. “Stainless Style” is more than just a vehicle for a single or two. Nice.

Oppenheimer, “Take the Whole Midrange and Boost It” (June 3, Bar/None Records): The sophomore release from Belfast, Northern Ireland, duo Shaun Robinson and Rocky O’Reilly walks a tightrope — to one side bone-rattling squalor, to the other primary-colored pop. Subtract the fuzz, and the twee-pop nation would have another happy citizen. With it (and with guest touches like vocals by Matt Caughtran of L.A. punks the Bronx on “The Never Never”), the album has bite to go along with its catchy title.

||| Live: Neon Neon and Oppenheimer (along with Jim Noir and others) play tonight at the Viper Room. Neon Neon also makes a 6 p.m. appearance at Amoeba Music.

More highlights for Monday, March 17

Explosions in the Sky rock the Wiltern tonight. … Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong join the bill for Voxhaul Broadcast’s Spaceland residency. … Jason Collett, who has another winner with his new album, “Here’s to Being Here,” headlines the Troubadour. … At the Roxy, it’s the tongue-twisting Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip, but far more interesting are the Fall-channeling supporting band These New Puritans. … The Chapin Sisters‘ residency at the Echo features the album-release show for local quintet the Billionaires, whose “Really Real for Forever” (out April 1) offers nifty slices of boy-girl pop.

– Kevin Bronson

Here’s the video for These New Puritans’ single, “Elvis” (album out Tuesday on Domino):

Stylish, understated (and hard-to-Google) L.A. singer-songwriter AM marks the release of his new duets EP, “Side by Side” (a mix of covers and originals, and the first in a planned series), with a show at Hotel Café on Tuesday. Meiko, Susie Suh, Julianna Raye and Buddy are among the CD collaborators expected to show up for a song or two.

Also on the bill tonight at the Hotel: Canadian Matthew Good, whose latest album, “Hospital Music,” has been nominated for a Juno.

Highlights for Tuesday, March 11

With the whole music world seemingly headed for the South by Southwest Music Festival, a couple of Austin-bound British bands play Eastside club shows: Liverpool trio the Wombats (a slightly court-jesterish version of the Libertines or Arctic Monkeys) play Spaceland, while new Columbia signees the Ting Tings, the hooky electro duo whose “Great DJ” single has already been made greater by Calvin Harris’ remix (hmm), play the Jensen Rec Center.

– Frank Farrar, Kevin Bronson

Photo by Bryony Shearmur