Kevin Bronson on October 17th, 2019

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L.A. quartet Saint Motel have never done anything by the industry book. Back in the days they were semi-fresh out of film school at Chapman College and their MySpace page was the best way to get in touch with them, they self-released the six-song EP “ForPlay” — but only after a two-year process that saw them fine-tune the songs live and make a video for every track.

Two full-lengths and an EP have followed, including the ubiquitous single “My Type.” Speaking of types, Saint Motel’s catalog reveals that they don’t have one — the quartet of A/J Jackson, Aaron Sharp, Dak Lerdamornpong and Greg Erwin work in various styles of pop and rock and spike their infectious tunes with horns and strings. In the old days, they’d be song-and-dance men. They don’t have a genre, they have an aesthetic: theatrical.

They have quite possibly outdone themselves with their ambitious new release, “The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Pt. 1,” which is a grandiose name for an EP-length installment of their new album.

The album is modeled after a typical three-act narrative structure known as “the hero’s journey.” The first five songs arrived this week with very cinematic visuals, and although each of the tracks could stand on its own as a single, “Pt. 1” is best enjoyed via YouTube to get all the interludes and see the dancers at work.

You may or may not be able to sort a story thread from the songs’ lyrics, but after enjoying the thoroughly engaging first act, Buzz Bands LA asked Jackson: Exactly who is the protagonist here? “Probably the listener,” he said coyly.

In fact, he describes the album as “a soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist.”

It’s easy to imagine a sweeping epic soundtracked by these songs, lavishly orchestrated and produced by Mark Needham, the Grammy-nominated producer/engineer/mixer. There’s a palpable glee in how the songs integrate sounds often thought to be “retro” into modern pop and rock and production. There’s “Old Soul,” a fully orchestrated finger-snapper, leading into “Sisters,” with Jackson crooning with female backup singers. Those Saint Motel horns come on strong in the disco-ready “Van Horn,” “Diane Mozart” starts balletic before morphing into some modern pop silliness (“Red rover send Mozart over,” really?), and the EP ends with the hair-flying-big chorus of “Save Me.”

So Act 1 ends in a tidy 20 minutes or so of audacious musicality, and we’ll have to wait a few months to see where the story takes us. Or whether we’ll just have to make one up.

||| Watch:  “The Original Movie Soundtrack, Pt. 1”

||| Also: Stream the EP via Spotify

||| Live: Saint Motel plays Jan. 24, 2020, at the Observatory (tickets) They also have shows scheduled at the Fonda Theatre on March 7 (tickets) and March 8 (tickets). Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday.