Kevin Bronson on August 6th, 2009

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Kissing Cousins’ name sounds cute, sure, but the Los Angeles quintet’s debut album “Pillar of Salt” [recommended] is serious stuff – brooding, yearning music that, in a stealthy way, is about as punk-rock as you can get with a flutist (Karo Haro). Songwriter Heather B. Heywood and bandmates Melissa Pleckham, Beth Zeigler, Alexis Woodall and Haro recorded the album, recently released on Orange County-based indie Velvet Blue Music, at the Sons of National Freedom Studio in semi-rural Oregon. It’s the headquarters of songwriter and sonic sorcerer Richard Swift, who committed Kissing Cousins’ songs to 2-inch tape over a two-day period, and then described them as “the Shangri-Las meets Black Sabbath.”

• ||| Download: “In Too Deep”

Kissing Cousins play Tuesday at the Echo and celebrate the vinyl release of their album on Aug. 30 at Origami Vinyl in Echo Park. I caught up with Heywood for a little Q&A about the Cousins and the album:

So are there actually any cousins in the band?

HH: No, we are just good friends. Sometimes we fight like cousins, though.

Over the course of your four EPs, Kissing Cousins sounded alternately like a girl group, punk-rock chicks and pop divas. How did you arrive at the aesthetic you achieved on your album?

HH: Well, we formed back in 2005, and since then a lot of it has been exploring, learning how to play our instruments and refining our songwriting. We eventually found ourselves more on the rock side of things than the punk-girl side. A lot of it had to do with the songs – I starting writing riffs and we just went with that.

Are the songs, which seem to be darker now, coming from a different emotional place?

HH: They came from a special emotional place; I don’t know if it was different. Because I knew these songs were intended for an album, after the first few songs I tried to write the others so they would make sense on the album. I didn’t want it to be chaotic … I didn’t want it to sound like just a history of our EPs.

With the songs on the album, was there a stronger connection to your religious upbringing?

HH: It’s strange, during the period I was writing I was spending a lot of time going back and forth to Alabama for various family things. Being home so much made a lot of those experiences come back. I find it interesting that I don’t live in that world anymore, so when I do go back, everything is so intriguing.

What was recording with Swift really like?

HH: It was an experience we never could have imagined. Of course, we showed up knowing we had only X amount of time to record 10 songs. But once we got into things, that’s when his magical touches appeared. Especially when Karo started adding her flute – he fell in love with it. It’s almost like when she started putting in her flute parts, he really began to care.

Last question – random. In an ideal scenario, Kissing Cousins would open for …

HH: PJ Harvey. That would be a dream come true. Her music was so important to me when I was younger, and to have grown up while watching her music progress has been amazing.