Kevin Bronson on July 22nd, 2010

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When Chris Newcomer left film school and moved from Baltimore to L.A. six-plus years ago, his guitar seldom left his apartment, and when he did play in front of people he was something of a one-trick pony.

“I’m such a big fan of the Who that sometimes it’s annoying to my friends,” he says. “Every time I pick up a guitar in someone’s apartment, I start playing ‘Substitute.'”

• ||| Download: “Treats”

Now he’s substituting his affection for classic rock with an embrace of disaffected noise-pop. As Polls – the L.A. trio that includes bassist David Franklin and drummer Julian Bellin – Newcomer couches slack pop melodies in guitar squalor and agitated rhythms. The fragile, almost tentative vocals on the trio’s debut EP (released digitally this week) cover those ragged edges with an icy-cool sheen.

Newcomer the musician only recently came out of his self-imposed isolation. “When I moved here, I didn’t know anybody,” he says, “The friends I did make were all in bands, and after a while I just got jealous. Two years ago I decided that if I don’t try to do this, it will never happen.”

Not that the songs he’d been writing on his own since elementary school would do. “Those probably sounded like really crappy Weezer songs, or Nirvana,” he says. “You go through that phase, and then you listen to more and more things and you get older and you [expand your horizons].”

The Polls EP has a cinematic edge too, which isn’t unusual coming from a musician who emerged from the visual arts. “I think a good song or good album has to have the same kind of arc a film has,” he says. “It has to start you at Point A and drop you off at Point X, and leave you wondering how you got there.”

||| Stream: The whole EP here.

||| Live: Polls celebrates its EP release with a show Tuesday at the Bootleg Theater with Random Patterns, Alpine Decline (ftr. ex-members of Mezzanine Owls) and Fiction Company.

Photos by Laurie Scavo