Photo By Aaron Farley

Brokedown no more: L.A. Indie Pop band The Broken West were forced to change their band moniker (conveniently) as their sound was changing shape.

A little over a year ago, The Brokedown, an L.A. quartet with a penchant for Power Pop and a relatively short history as a band, self-released their debut EP, The Dutchman's Gold. Although spotty distribution kept a lot of people from hearing it, those that did were captivated by the band's grasp of '60s Pop and how to translate it into contemporary sound and vision.

Just after the release of The Dutchman's Gold, the band (multi-instrumentalists Ross Flournoy and Dan Iead and drummer Rob McCorkindale) found themselves down a member and asked bassist Brian Whelan to sit in for an important upcoming opening slot.

"I was in the Eugene Edwards Band and we played a couple shows with The Brokedown," recalls Whelan. "They basically asked me to play bass for one show, when we opened for Jason Falkner at (L.A. club) Spaceland and I took the gig. We had this barbeque and hung out for the whole weekend, and I thought, 'These guys are really cool.' Then they asked me to join the band and that was it. Sometimes it's just that easy."

Nothing regarding the music industry is ever "that easy," but The Brokedown certainly seemed to be living a charmed existence on a particularly fast track. After the release of the EP and Whelan's hiring, The Brokedown opened a couple of shows for Portastatic in North Carolina, which exposed them to Mac McCaughan and Merge Records. Without ever having to play a ton of showcases or send out blind demo packages to faceless labels, The Brokedown scored their Merge contract almost effortlessly. That was when the band's prospective gravy train threatened to jump the rails.

"About a month after we got signed to Merge and they announced it, we got a cease and desist letter through MySpace," says Whelan. "It was the owner of this bedroom label, one of whose bands is The Brokedowns, and they said, 'You have to change this or we're going to sue you.' We've known about them and I think they knew about us; I think that was the reason there was no 's' in the first place, because there was a band called The Brokedowns. In order to get the record out on time, we had to change (the name)."

It was an incredibly fast and potentially confusing scramble. The band had already completed their full-length debut album, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On, and delivered it to Merge after signing. The label pressed up 1,000 copies of an advance and mailed it out to the media with the legally contentious name. Within mere weeks of the mailing, the band was forced to come up with a new band identity or face the legal consequences.

"That was the part that was kind of the bummer about it," says Whelan. "They were kind of semi-opportunistic people to wait until something happened to jump on it. They weren't complaining about Dutchman's Gold. It got a couple of good reviews but it wasn't like it was selling a lot of copies."

And so it came to pass that L.A.'s Brokedown became The Broken West. In three days' time.

"We were under the gun, and we picked something that sounded similar and didn't have any more or any less meaning," says Whelan with a laugh. "We just needed something to stop the bleeding."

In retrospect, the name change might have come at something of an opportune moment for The Broken West. In the interim between the recording sessions for The Dutchman's Gold and I Can't Go On, the band had steered away from the gentle AltCountry twang of the EP in favor of a harder-edged Pop/Rock swing. With less Neil Young and Flying Burrito Brothers and more Big Star and The Kinks (as filtered through a Shins/New Pornographers prism) in the mix, the band's Pop classicism was definitely coming to the fore, maybe not enough to warrant a name change but enough of a shift to justify one that was going to happen anyway.

"There was definitely a conscientious approach that involved not having pedal steel and not having songs that sounded like they were from (Wilco's) AM," says Whelan. "But Ross has always been into writing these perfect Pop songs, a la Big Star and Teenage Fanclub, which he did to a certain extent on the EP. That's not a huge progression but there was a conscious desire to move away from AltCountry. We all really like that stuff but it pigeonholes you somewhat if you decide to be an AltCountry band. It pigeonholes what kind of crowd is going to come to your shows, what kind of venues you can play, certainly what kind of labels you can talk to. It's just not quite as interesting as the Power Pop thing we did here. A song like 'On the Bubble' reminds me of very early Elvis Costello and the Attractions, but in my mind, and this sounds kind of cheesy, it's all Rock & Roll."

As proof that the Broken West's sonic evolution has been relatively seamless, the band chose to include one of the EP's standout tracks, "Down in the Valley," on I Can't Go On, exactly as it was recorded for the EP. Without prior knowledge of the EP, one would never guess that the song wasn't intended for this set.

While Dutchman's Gold found fairly consistent critical favor, I Can't Go On has inspired a wide range of opinions, from slavish praise to shrugging indifference. Some of the criticism has been plain baffling to the band.

"I think the strangest thing people have an issue with is that it's too derivative, and that's strange to me because I feel like everything is derivative," says Whelan. "That's the most obvious thing. It just depends on what you're influenced by. The trendy thing now is more of a Smiths trip or a Pink Floyd trip; it's definitely a lot artier. People who are looking for an arty record are going to be disappointed with our record. That's the double-edged sword about '60s music. It hadn't been done before and it was really great but then you spend 40 years with everyone trying to replicate it. Forty years down the line and we're still listening to '60s music and it's very fertile ground. It's all great music ... now we're looking back to it."