Kevin Bronson on June 7th, 2010

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Over the past few years, the Henry Clay People have progressed from party animals to scene stars to the rare band capable of making classic rock sound fresh and relevant. Their third album, “Somewhere on the Golden Coast,” comes out Tuesday on TBD Records (home to Radiohead and Autolux, among others), and any Silver Laker who’s thrown back PBRs to the Henry Clays’ ragged sibling revelry will notice that brothers Joey and Andy Siara and gang have grown up a little.

Pavement and Tom Petty were Points A and B in the previous Henry Clay diagram. Now – perhaps in part due to the annexation of Marvelous Toy frontman Jordan Hudock and his rollicking piano lines – the quickly paced “Golden Coast” sounds like a band trying to rush through its last few songs because a barroom brawl has broken out. Which, in this case, is a good thing. Joey Siara’s shout-singing is less adenoidal; still, between smiles and snarls and smirks he aims his lyrical volleys well (even turning some on himself). The neck-snapping guitar riffs remain – as do the songs “Working Part Time” and “This Ain’t a Scene,” two stalwart tracks from 2008’s “For Cheap or For Free” that were re-recorded and included on the new album at the behest of their new label.

• ||| Download: “Your Famous Friends”

The Henry Clays, with original drummer Eric Scott returning to the fold, embark June 15 on a nationwide tour supporting Silversun Pickups and Against Me! I cornered Joey Siara for a Q&A about the new album and, in case he found my questions boring, subjected the UC Santa Barbara history major to intermittent pop quizzes, some about the band’s namesake, a 19th-century Kentucky statesman:

“Working Part Time” and “This Ain’t a Scene” hold up nicely, even the second time around. Some of us are even still working part time. But as a now-longtime observer, what are your thoughts on the Silver Lake scene?

Joey Siara: It’s funny about that song – I think people heard “scene” and thought “yeah!” But the song was more about a bunch of lonely people in search of something who just want to hang out in a social setting. … But certainly it was a different scene when we started playing than it is now. Things ebb and flow, and the days of the same four bands playing the Echo and Mr. T’s are over, or at least the four bands have changed. I think it became dangerously incestuous; there were a lot of stock Silver Lake shows where everybody was playing their friends shows. Now there are a lot more bands.

Pop quiz: Henry Clay was a) a U.S. Senator, b) Speaker of the House, c) Secretary of State, d) all of the above.

JS: d). [correct]

I thought you’d done the whole album with Aaron Espinoza, but I see there were sessions with Raymond Richards and David Newton.

JS: Me and my last-minute additions. It’s a bad idea to do things that way, but that’s sometimes the way I work. The two ends of the album (the 1:04 “Nobody Taught Us to Quit” and “Two Lives at the End of the Night”) are last-minute things. With “Two Lives” we had the album done and TBD already had it, but I wrote the song on Monday, recorded it Tuesday, had it mastered by Friday and then begged the label to please let me put it on the record. “Nobody Taught Us” was done in a half an hour at Newton’s studio with Andy trying to talk me out of it – he’s always trying to put the kabosh on all my last-minute stuff. But I wanted Andy’s voice on the record – it’s him singing “Nobody taught us to quit / but we were learning pretty quick.”

Pop quiz: Which of the following presidents did Henry Clay not lose an election to? a) Martin Van Buren, b) Andrew Jackson, c) James K. Polk, d) He lost to all of them.

JS: a) [correct]

Does “Golden Coast” seem to you to be a big progression in the band’s sound?

JS: I think as a writer I write the same kind of songs, but sonically there were certain things I wanted to avoid. I put a veto on all pedal steel – because, fair or not, when people hear that, they think “country.” And I wanted to crank the distortion and gain on the amplifiers, because in the end I think we’re more of a punk band. I know some people like “For Cheap or For Free” but I thought it was a pretty polite record. I didn’t want this one to be as nice. And at 33 minutes, it’s sequenced like a punk record. I have ADD as much as anybody; I can’t make it through a 50-minute album anymore.

Pop quiz: Silver Lake band history combined with politics: Which presidential surname is shared by a former member of the Silversun Pickups? a) Nixon, b) Clinton, c) Kennedy, d) Johnson.

JS: c) [correct]

Ignoring, if I can, the two old ones, the tone of the songs seems to have changed too.

JS: Some [relationship] stuff got a little heavier … [grabbing a copy of the CD and pointing to song titles] here, here, here, here and here. … Last year we were on the road 5 1/2 months, and when you’re gone that long you can’t expect to come back to the same home you left. The trajectory of people’s lives change. At the end of the day, I want my old life back but I can’t have it.

Pop quiz: True or false, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same county in Kentucky.

JS: Hmm … true? [incorrect – he fell for the bait. Clay was born in Virginia.]

Part of the Henry Clays’ appeal is the tension between you and your brother, slamming bodies, mugging at each other … Who wins the inevitable brotherly fights?

JS: I win maybe 75% of the arguments, but physical fights I’m down to like 20%. He’s crazier than I am and he’s stronger than I am. He’s the 23-year-old equivalent to Tony Soprano in terms of entitled badass-ness. On our first tour somebody had to pull Andy off me. But on [this spring’s] Drive By Truckers tour, we had no fights. That’s the first time that’s happened. Of course, the tour was only two weeks long.

Pop quiz: Henry Clay People history. The band that followed you onstage at Lollapalooza last year was: a) Heartless Bastards, b) Other Lives, c) Tom Petty, d) Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears.

JS: That’s easy, d). [correct]

||| The album: Recommended.

||| Live: The Henry Clay People celebrate their album release with a show Tuesday at Spaceland.