Considering Yoodoo Park’s obvious affection for bands from the time when irony ruled, it’s rather ironic that a lot of folks don’t get what he often does with GRMLN.

Take the Japanese-born, California-based singer-songwriter’s debut full-length, Empire. Musically, the album is a gold-star update of the records Matador and Merge were releasing back when Kurt Cobain’s corpse was still warm and Seinfeld was king of the airwaves. Lyrically, though, Park often comes on like a man who can relate on more than one level to Nirvana’s epic downer In Utero, the songs hinting that someone has had his fair share of failed romances and bummed-out nights at the lonely end of the bar.

Reached at his parents’ house in Orange Country, Park notes that he first tried out the combination of light and dark on his debut EP, Explore, citing that record’s “Depressions” as a great example of sending music fans a mixed message. To his surprise, no one got the joke.

“It’s supposed to be ironic how the lyrics are sometimes depressing, but the sound is really upbeat,” he says. “But people often get confused. I mean, I want the songs to sound happy and enjoyable to listen to, even if what I’m singing isn’t always happy.”

While he’s careful to state that he’s not the kind of person who graduated magna cum laude from Bummer High, Park learned to accept the fact that angst is more often than not good for art.

“I’m not a depressing person,” he says with a laugh. “But the thing is, that kind of stuff just comes easier. It’s easier to write when you are a bit down.”

Judging by Empire, the business of writing stick-on-first-listen songs also comes easy to Park, which explains why GRMLN has emerged as one of those instant blogosphere-blessed buzz bands. The group started out as a bedroom project, with the singer-songwriter messing around by himself while studying psychology in university. Pretty quickly, music started to take precedent over higher education, making GRMLN seem far more important to him than his GPA. Today, Park has decided that he’s going to ditch school for the time being in favour of life on the road.

“My grades weren’t that great,” Park says with a laugh, “so I figured that I might as well start doing this. I figure I can always go back to school.”

That doesn’t seem like a rash decision, with Empire’s stupidly catchy songs ranging from the sticky-sweet jagged pop of “Teenage Rhythm” to the jangly slanted-and-enchanted college rock of “Coastal Love”. It’s all guaranteed to take the sting out of the fact that you never saw Superchunk, Poster Children, or Nada Surf back when they were all young and beautiful. Yes, while the singer’s undying affection for Fugazi has been mentioned in nearly every article ever written about GRMLN, his love for the ’90s hardly stops there.

“My music doesn’t sound like Fugazi, but they do show up in what I’m doing,” Park suggests. “More like in a ‘These guys are cool, and I want to make music the way that they made music’ kind of way. It’s more of a spiritual thing. The music that I’m making is driven by a sort of subconscious thing. Like, ‘I want to make the music that I hear in my head, and this is what that music sounds like.’ ”