Kevin Bronson on June 15th, 2010

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Chasing Kings set the bar pretty high simply with the title of last year’s debut EP, “The Current State of Our Future,” six songs of high anxiety and higher energy in which Matt Schwartz’s big voice presides over a fast-paced duel between piano licks and guitar chops. “Once upon a summer / we were desperate to be younger still,” he sings in the title track, and on a disc filled with “Empathy” and “Empty Handshakes,” it’s easy to forget how young – still – Chasing Kings are.

Schwartz and bandmates Drew Beck, Mike Goldman and Nick Sandler are growing up fast though, and taking lumps along the way. Like a few weeks ago, when their van (with one payment remaining) was stolen just prior to a West Coast tour. “It was bad for us but good for [Orange County rockers] Mississippi Man, I guess,” Beck deadpans. “The most valuable thing in the van was their CD, which was in the player. At least whoever stole it knows who Mississippi Man is now.”

||| Download: “The Current State of Our Future” and (previously posted): “In This Town”

That’s a good spin, and the kind of attitude the quartet brings to their music.

Beck and Schwartz met as youngsters in Lake Arrowhead, and even after Beck moved to Malibu the pair continued to explore music together. “One summer he spent a whole month sleeping on the couch,” says Beck, who met Sandler through basketball and Goldman because he and Sandler played in a jazz band together. After a detour to Boston, where Schwartz and Sandler spent time at Berklee School of Music, the band settled in L.A. to work in earnest.

The jazz influences can certainly be heard in some of Chasing Kings’ songs, but so can their parents’ record collections – as well as Schwartz’s insistence on somehow moving the quartet’s piano-based rock out of the past. As a keyboardist, he’s something of a mad scientist (Silver Lakers will be reminded of Jonathan Hylander of the Voyeurs, another guy who plays like he’s in a chase scene in “Fast and Furious”), the kind of ivory-tickler who probably regrets every time he sits down at the keyboard that he’s not octopodan.

“Matt has a lot of ideas, and he gets very excited about them,” Beck says smiling. “Almost every show there will be something a little bit different – I’ll be honest, sometimes it’s like ‘Where did he pull that out of?’ But we like a live show to be that way.”

With the band having written “20 or 25” new songs with an eye on assembling a first album, Chasing Kings spent this year alternating between touring (mini-swings and South by Southwest), local gigs and recording, always sounding as if they’re in a hurry to be heard. Because, as the song says, you never know.

“Only certain of uncertainty / old age is lacking hospitality,” Schwartz sings in “The Current State of Our Future,” and ain’t it the truth. “It’s a pretty big thing to dwell on, for sure,” Beck says. “It’s scary, it’s exciting and it’s certainly unpredictable.”

||| Live: Chasing Kings perform tonight (at 9) at Spaceland – and on Thursday, July 22, opening for Voxhaul Broadcast as part of the Also I Like to Rock series at the Hammer Museum.