The Outline round into shape on new EP

Kevin Bronson on
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The Outline are back to following their own diagram.

It’s been four years to to the week since the L.A. rockers’ debut album came out and they headed out on the road, first on the Warped Tour and then as support for hardcore guys Saosin. Both tours seemed odd for the music on the aptly titled “You Smash It, We’ll Build Around It,” which seemed too indie-rock for screamo audiences. But the band was young and signed to Fearless Records, “and we went with the flow of the people we were working with,” frontman Graham Fink says.

Two-plus years later, the Outline was back on its own, weaving its intricate song structures with brooding drama and heady bombast for 2009’s self-released “Phantasmagoria,” an ambitious but inscrutable album that sounds like the Killers gone experimental. Now Fink and bandmates Max St. John and Austen Lee are back with the “Who You Love” EP, the band’s hookiest and most immediately catchy work to date.

“These songs came from more of a live music place instead of us writing by sitting in front of a laptop,” St. John says. Adds Fink: “This is essentially a live set converted into an EP.”

The Outline’s penchant for agitated beats, scratchy guitars, tricky time signatures and other assorted surprises (i.e., the robotic vocals on “Our Finest Flaws”) is still there, but “Who You Love” – produced by Queens of the Stone Age’s Michael Shuman – leaves a sweeter melodic aftertaste.

There were hints of that on the original album, even if, as Fink says, “a lot of those songs we wrote when we were 17.” But it’s obvious the Outline has grown up a lot, and not in the way their original handlers foresaw. “They wanted us to be one of those [Alternative Press] bands and tried to jam us into that mold,” Lee says.

Says St. John: “It’d be nice if the people who knew about our band four years ago would come back and rediscover the band.”

||| Download: “Isolene” (e-mail required)

||| Live: The Outline are doing the Monday night residency this month the Bootleg Theater, tonight with the Color Turning and the Damselles.