Kevin Bronson on March 9th, 2009

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Singer-guitarist Tim Scanlin would be the first to admit that he and his bandmates in Actionslacks no longer belong in the peer group “Kids With Guitars.” But that doesn’t mean the quartet is trudging quietly into middle age. On the contrary, considering their new digital EP with that very name.

“No, I don’t think we’re kids – we have kids. But I don’t want to become that Dad Rock guy. We are certainly no longer kids, but I still feel like I’m 25,” Scanlin says. “We’ve gone back to our strong suit, which is short, loud, melodic indie rock. That’s going to be our trajectory from here on out.”

• ||| Download the title track: “Kids With Guitars”

• ||| Get the whole EP: “Kids With Guitars”

It’s a trajectory worth following – or retracing, if you, like most, never ran across the quartet that formed 15 years in San Francisco and, by drummer Marty Kelly’s own admission, did their business “along the margins of the music industry” through four albums. “Kids With Guitars,” their first release since the almost-incendiary “Full Upright Position” in 2004, offers Actionslacks’ vintage churn and Scanlin’s reprobatory lyrical stylings. Seems like 1994 was yesterday, yes?

“As a band, we’ve come full circle,” the singer says. “We started off not giving a sh*t, then we started getting better, and then we started getting careerist, worrying about what this label might like or what radio might like, and slowly descended into the milieu of being professional musicians. And now we’re strictly doing it for fun. We’re back where we were in our practice days when I was 24.”

Musically maybe. But geographically, “Kids With Guitars” posed a challenge. Scanlin lives in L.A., Kelly lives in Maine. Guitarist Chuck Lindo and bassist Ross Murray live in the Bay Area. They traded demos over the Internet before convening in San Francisco last May for a weeklong recording session.

The title track is not self-referential. Instead, it’s Scanlin’s take on how “guitar-based music is still going so strong,” he says. “Periodically, you hear people say rock is over. But it isn’t. The crux of that song is that you are crazy if you think kids are going to stop playing guitar. It’s a primal thing.”

Scanlin finds no shortage of other topics to weigh in on – and he’s never been shy about that. “Our lyrics have always been pretty literal, and even didactic a little bit,” he says. “‘Full Upright Position’ was particularly strident. … But I’ve always admired writers like Elvis Costello and Johnette Napolitano and D. Boon, who write very [straight-ahead] lyrics without being preachy.

“Being middle-aged and having a family certainly informs what you’re writing about. … But I am still kinda pissed off about a lot of things,” Scanlin says. “I wrote a song called ‘I’m Not Angry Anymore’ during a three-week period when life was going pretty good. After I sent the demo to the band, Marty called me out on it. He said, ‘Dude, you’re going crazy – there’s plenty to be pissed about.'”

||| More: Download “Simple Life (acoustic)” and check out streams of the band’s “Greatest Misses.”