Kevin Bronson on April 15th, 2009

0

It’s easy to be wowed by the primal noises that Robert Davis, guitarist for the L.A. quartet the Yelling, coaxes out of his axe. It’s a hypodermic needle of Zeppelin juice, or a long tall drink of Jack White, and if it doesn’t get your blood pumping then you’d better stick to your hippie-fied electro-pop acts.

But Davis has other skills too. “Robert’s become a gourmet chef,” bandmate and frontman Nathaniel Cox says. “He makes a hell of a pasta – we’ve got to find a way to get a stove on the road.”

• ||| Download: “Fire and a Microphone”

And it’s a long road ahead – the Yelling unveils its debut album “Long Time My Love” on April 28 and then plans to set about spreading the gospel of New Classic Rock to audiences everywhere. The foursome, with Michael Judd on drums and Chris McKee on bass, is self-releasing the album, so it doesn’t figure to be easy, but Cox and Davis think the musical landscape might be ready for some old-fashioned, pedal-to-the-metal rock.

“I don’t think we necessarily have our finger on the today’s musical pulse,” Cox says. “We love the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV on the Radio and Radiohead and a lot of other modern bands, but we don’t necessarily go for any kind of sound. We just write what we feel, and if it turns out like classic rock, that’s what it sounds like.”

Cox and Davis, boyhood pals from a small town in southern Illinois, were bandmates in the short-lived Epic rock band Revis – “It was a totally different kind of music, but it was a great learning experience,” Cox says – but after its members went different ways, the duo began writing material in a downtown warehouse. The Yelling’s initial EP last year put the quartet on the map, and their live shows pricked some more ears.

“L.A. is a tough place to pull from,” the singer-guitarist acknowledges, “but our audience is growing little by little.”

The songwriting on “Long Time My Love” is a mix of ideas Cox brought to the band and material that was hammered out in jam sessions, and despite its fury, the album is no one-note blast. “21st Century Freak” is a Zep-inspired scorcher, and the title track is a psych-rock freakout inspired by Cox’s observations in downtown L.A. “Mother Carried a Child” is an imagined scenario that slow-builds from acoustic beginnings to grand-scale dream-rock. “We tried to maintain the live feel when we recorded the album,” Cox says, and by and large they have.

Whether the Yelling ends up with support from a record label remains to be seen. “To be honest, I don’t know what the deal is with record labels – it’s not like it was five years ago,” Cox says. “We’re just gonna continue to do what we do.”

||| Live: The Yelling plays Thursday at the Viper Room.