Kevin Bronson on June 23rd, 2011

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Any conversation with Mike Mancillas, aka Malcom Sosa, is liable to touch on the roller-coaster fortunes of his band (Rademacher), long commutes between their dual “homes” of Fresno and Silver Lake, post-modernism, Kurt Vonnegut, the merits of philosophizing over large cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and the seemingly utter futility of life inside indie-rock’s bubble.

Mancillas is tackling most of that in a trilogy of mini-albums titled “Baby Hawk” – the first, “Baby Hawk (Part I of III),” comes out July 5. And, to put it in the vernacular of the tallboy-wielding scenesters on the Eastside, it’s f*cking rad. If you’ve spent time inside the bubble, that is.

||| Download: “They Are Always Into That”

“Our biggest supporters have always been people in other bands,” Mancillas says of his story, which loosely follows the career arc of a group of fictional indie-rockers named Baby Hawk. “They’ll get it.”

The concept album’s first installment, six songs, wrestles directly and indirectly with some nagging questions: What is art? Who is it for? And mostly: What’s the use? At turns wry and censorious, Rademacher uses its rough-hewn indie rock – barbed-wire guitars, funhouse keyboard lines, Mancillas’ shout-sung vocals – to dissect what it’s like to make rough-hewn indie rock. The title track charts the ups and downs of a band “playing midnight slots in Eastside clubs”; “They Are Always Into That” (“All the best songs / are love songs”) is subtle condemnation of simply giving the people what they want; and “Silver Lake” drips with been there-done that acid. And that’s not even mentioning the song “Pessimist.”

Yes, the album’s protagonists could indeed be Rademacher, who made a unjustly overlooked record, “Stunts,” in 2007 and (to quote a lyric from “Baby Hawk”) “got kinda big.” But Mancillas is not bitter.

“I’m still hopeful, but I think I see things a little differently than a lot of my contemporaries in L.A.,” he says. “I like witnessing the heady rush of success, or what you think it might be, and then the gritty reality of being out there. Sometimes I think I could be even more jaded.

“At the beginning you do it because there’s a promise of an audience at the end of the rainbow. Isn’t that the reason anybody does anything in an artistic field? … Everybody fantasizes about being on top, playing that big show, what you’re gonna wear, what you’re gonna play, but after a while all those thoughts take a toll.” Often, an artistic one.

The track “Baby Hawk” is in some ways the indie-rock answer to MC Lars’ hilarious song “Signing Emo,” except that Rademacher’s heroes never even get enough traction to get a record contract. “At the end of ‘Baby Hawk,’ I kinda take it to the darkest place I can imagine,” Mancillas says. “It’s just about artists devolving into primitive, angry, broke people.”

How … post-modern?

Mancillas laughs. “Yeah, but who else is going to do a post-modern record and then do an interview to talk about it?”

||| Live: Rademacher plays July 14 at the Bootleg Theater.

Photo by Stephen Gamboa