Almost famous The Thrills escape the fashion police BY JEFF MILLER

"The fashion police declared that it was illegal to own a Belle & Sebastian record and a Duran Duran B-sides collection," says Conor Deasy, the singer for the Thrills, his Irish lilt resonating to the top of the gigantic Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine, California, about an hour outside Los Angeles. "With this song, we’re trying to put an end to that way of thinking."

With that, the piano intro from "One Horse Town," a jangly piece of near pop perfection, kicks in. It’s a song from the band’s debut album, So Much for the City (Virgin), which came out last year to critical praise and commercial indifference. This wasn’t quite what the band — who’ve gone platinum multiple times in their home country — were expecting. But that’s what they got. So tonight, instead of playing to a sellout crowd on their own, they’re in the middle of another of a long list of American supporting dates; this one is with the Pixies. (They’re not, however, playing on that band’s Boston dates.) A member of R.E.M. guests on their new Let’s Bottle Bohemia (Virgin). One of their first fans was Morrissey. They’ve played to audiences of more than 100,000 in Ireland, yet tonight, an hour before the show, guitarist Daniel Ryan isn’t even recognized by one fan as we sit down to talk on the wet grass in front of the box office.

"Whenever you’re supporting a band, it’s always a little bit difficult," he says. He’s wearing sandals, shorts, and a ratty T-shirt. Forget the Duran Duran records — the fashion police wouldn’t even be able to look him in the eye in this get-up. Later, he’ll insist on having a picture taken from the waist up. ("I just woke up," he says.) But on stage, he’s just changed to jeans and sneakers. Unlike, say, the very fashion-conscious guys in Franz Ferdinand, the Thrills don’t have as much invested in their clothes as they do in their music. You can hear that dedication on both albums, which share an affinity for major chords and resonant melodies. Bohemia is, however, decidedly different from So Much for the City, where sunny songs like "Santa Cruz (You’re Not That Far)" and "Big Sur" got the band compared with the Beach Boys. "That’s bullshit," Ryan says. "It’s just looking at the back of the record and looking at the song titles."

He’s half-right: the song titles were a hint, but it was the ooh-la-la background vocals and the mandolin-and-reverb-guitar sound that pushed City over the edge into Beach Boys territory. ("We own all their records," Ryan does admit.) Bohemia includes a collaboration with Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks, yet its sound is both derivative and grown-up, and its range is rare to see in a band so young, from the power rock of the opener, "Tell Me Something I Don’t Know," to the meandering piano balladry of "Not for All the Love in the World," which may have the best opening line of any cross-generational love song this year: "You show your age/When you drown your rage/But I see past those laughter lines." The album peaks with the multi-pronged "Found My Rosebud," which opens with a single harmonica chord before ripping into a massive drum build that gives way to the explosive chorus. Before the final fade, there’s a guitar-and-vocals-only segment that reveals the band’s greatest strength, Deasy’s wheezy vocal delivery — sometimes he sounds as if he were gasping just to get air out. Ryan knows exactly where the song came from. " ‘Rosebud’ was probably a result of listening to Bruce Springsteen. It has a bit of that ‘Born To Run’ feel to it."

It sure does. And when they play it tonight, it’s the link between the Thrills and the Pixies, a song that sounds both raucous and timeless. Ryan doesn’t see that link — when I ask why they’re on the tour, he says, "I never understand — I never understood it with Morrissey, either." He does say, however, that he was told Frank Black heard a bit of the Byrds in the band’s songs and that that led to the invitation.

The Byrds. Springsteen. The Beach Boys. All great artists — but not exactly the sound of today’s breakthrough rock. Still, the Thrills are far from giving up on American success. This season, they’ll play themselves on an episode of The O.C., running through "Not for All the Love in the World" and the stomping "Saturday Night." (None of the members has as yet seen the show.) And though the Bohemia run has just begun, they’re already working on their next record. "You need to challenge yourself when you’re in a band," Ryan says. "If you start kind of sitting on what you have, it’s hard to remember why you’re in a band."