Alex Ebert could easily double as some kind of indie-rock messiah. Fronting his new band, the 11- or 12-member strong Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Ebert appears onstage shirtless and barefoot, strands of shoulder-length hair tied back in a faux crown as he conducts his smiling, face-painted ensemble like a giddy choir director.
At those moments, he is no longer Alex Ebert, hard-partying lead singer of the dance-rock band Ima Robot; he becomes Edward Sharpe, his boyhood alter ego, and his band is his family. His agenda, as 1960s as it sounds, is little more than love and honesty.
"I'm a naked dude," says Ebert, 30. "I've been humbled to the floor."
What he's built is one of the more unusual musical acts to emerge from Los Angeles in some time. From their start as an unwieldy recording project for Ebert's songs, the Zeros -- who release a new EP digitally today in advance of their debut album, due out July 14 -- have become standard-bearers for the folk-rock revival.
Their big, open-hearted anthems evoke a different (but perhaps no less turbulent) era when cynicism and irony didn't course through pop music like countermelodies. And the band's aesthetic, no matter how organic its evolution, screams throwback -- right down to touring in a converted school bus with the band's name in script on the side and a driver named Cornfed.
"That bus is like stepping into a hippie wet dream," drummer Josh Collazo jokes.
A recent Flaunt magazine story coined a catchall for revivalists such as the Zeros: "hippie-sters." Ebert cringes at that. "Categories . . . that's insular stuff. It's not real."
What is, he says, is sharing the music that came out of his personal rebirth.
Ima Robot, which emerged as a reliable L.A. party band early in the decade and made two albums for Virgin Records, fit the younger Ebert's live-fast mantra. "I used to say my primary motivation was getting things done before I die. I was getting a lot of things done, but I was a mess," he says. "I ended up on a lot of drugs; I basically lost myself. The last two years we were on the major label, I became an automaton -- I became a robot.
"It wasn't anything about the music. With Ima Robot, life was all an exorcism. With this, it's all an infusion."
For a time, Ebert was living in a place with no phone. He met Jade Castrinos, who now sings in the band. He read Kerouac, attended AA meetings and started working on songs in the Laurel Canyon house shared by now-bandmates Nico Aglietti and Aaron Older.
