Hello Stranger ready to strike out on its own.

Byline: Serena Markstrom The Register-Guard

CONCERT PREVIEW Hello Stranger What: Rock When: 9 p.m. Wednesday Where: Sam Bond's Garage, 407 Blair Blvd. Cost: $4 at the door

When reached at her Los Angeles home before the band's first national headlining tour, Hello Stranger lead vocalist Juliette Commagere was busy packing.

"I don't feel like cleaning my room," she said. "We've never been gone for more than five weeks at a time. It's just crazy."

Now that the band, which got some attention under its previous name, Vagenius, when it toured with Kings of Leon, is touring behind its own album through mid-October, it's time for the craziness.

Hello Stranger decided to go the indie route, signing with Aeronaut Records after turning down major label deals that would ask Commagere to sing dumb songs and sex it up.

For instance, the song "Screwed" was shopped to Hello Stranger, but members declined. So it's on Paris Hilton's debut album, if that gives you any idea what an awesome song it is.

Hello Stranger wanted to sing its own compositions, most of which have a pop sensibility accessible to mainstream audiences - even they aren't stories about people hooking up.

The official release date is Tuesday, the same day "Paris" comes out. On Wednesday, the four-piece band will say hello to many strangers in its Eugene debut at Sam Bond's Garage.

If there were any justice in the music industry, this album would run sales circles around Ms. Hilton's record. But we all know how that's going to turn out.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Commagere has had a front row seat to social-climbing, privileged artists who feel entitled to fame. The song "Everyone Comes Here" is a critique of that scene, which Commagere is still a part of, but reflecting on as she matures.

"I'm kind of joking, but I'm also very serious," she said. "When I was writing that, I was thinking a lot about my friends. When you are just out of high school, you think you are better than everyone."

Sound echoes the 1980s

An 1980s synth-pop sound is hard not to notice, but Commagere said she doesn't think of her band as an '80s clone. The lyrics are weightier than much of the peppy tone that defined that decade, but it's fair to file the electronic keyboard action of Hello Stranger next to bands such as Blondie.

"Here We Go Again" has a drum rhythm and intro that sounds an awful lot like "My Sharona." And indeed, some of these songs would seem at home on the "Reality Bites" soundtrack.

Time will tell what conclu- sions to draw about a band that named itself after a Truman Capote short story - about, according to The New York Times, "a solid citizen's slipping into a desperate middle-aged crisis."

Commagere knows where the music came from, and it was not 1980s worship. She joked and called it "country-meets-electro" and "synth-infused blues."

"It's like old school pop but with synthesizers, a little rock 'n' roll, I don't know," she said. "We're drawing from lots of genres and eras of music.

`I think it's more country in the songwriting sensibility. We don't really write a lot of songs about partying."

The keytar had just been invented when the 26-year-old vocalist was born. When she, her boyfriend since high school, Joachim Cooder, and Jared Smith were forming the band and deciding instrumentation, she ended up with a keytar because she didn't want to hide behind a piano.

There's no guarantee she'll wear the tall red boots, or any of the Barbarella-esque clothes she posed in for publicity photos. But Commagere promised the live show is as good as the recording. "I think we bring it," she said. "We're all really good musicians, I have to say."

Hello Stranger fans, she said, tend to be the "party crowd" who would dress up anyway, so she doesn't believe her band is inspiring any look-alikes or theme dressers, a la Madonna in the "Material Girl" days. Any girls wearing '80s styles to shows aare doing so just because that all that stuff is back in style.

Hello Stranger is a band you can get excited about. Grab a group of friends, some bangle bracelets, shoes you can bounce around in and head down to Sam Bond's, if for no other reason than in the hope what we won't always have Paris.