On Tuesday November 9, The London Souls will join Alberta Cross on a Rocks Off Concert Cruise presented by Cameo Gallery, John Varvatos and Relix.

If you live in the New York City area, you’ve had ample opportunity to see The London Souls over the past two years, which is to say, you’ve been able to watch them incubate. If you don’t, then get ready: with a full-length album (at last), national touring plans (at last), it’s time for the trio to spread the fuss.

And it’s quite a fuss. Tag them as funky R&B, groovy blues or throbbing garage rock and you wouldn’t be wrong, but you wouldn’t be completely right either. One way to think about the trio, whose members are all younger than 25 and whose name nods to the homeland of its many ‘60s and ‘70s musical heroes, is as a groove-driven hybrid of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sly & The Family Stone and the raw, early Led Zeppelin – with all of the soul, guitar acrobatics, rhythmic horsepower and sonic heft that this implies.

“I’d been talking to [drummer] Chris [St. Hillaire] about starting this band and I’d lined a gig up downtown,” recalls vocalist/guitarist Tash Neal of the band’s 2008 founding. “We hadn’t even played together, so we went over a couple songs over the phone. It was an awesome show.” He pauses for a moment before turning to bassist/falsetto crooner Kyoshi Matsuyama to say, “I think it was an awesome show?”
“It was,” confirms Matsuyama who joined the group via former guitarist Tom Cumming. “But I didn’t even know Tash before I got there. I think he thought I was the sound guy. But soon we were playing, and we were right there: ‘Do you know this song? Do you know that song?’”

St. Hillaire chimes in, too: “I was rummaging through my basement the other day, and I found a VHS tape of that show. It was an awesome show. It was our very first show, at Kenny’s Castaways [in New York City].”

All three live in New York now, but Neal is the true local – a Manhattanite from birth. St. Hillaire hails from Sharon, Mass., near Boston’s South Shore, while Matsuyama is from Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. St. Hillaire and Neal already knew each other before forming the band, but it was actually the band’s former fourth member – guitarist Cumming – who provided the initial cohesion having known Matsuyama as a schoolmate. After Cumming left the band, The London Souls briefly thought about replacing him but soon decided that a power trio was the way to go.

“We changed a lot, arrangement-wise,” St. Hillaire says. “It was kind of the same roots, but more guitar-driven, and a lot of harmonies. I think it’s aggressive now.”

Once a trio, Neal began searching for a more concise sound – “less five-minute-long guitar duels” – in a band with more space to fill that didn’t want to lose any intensity, either.

It wasn’t long before the group began catching fellow musicians’ ears. One is Warren Haynes, who has hosted the band at both Christmas Jam and Mountain Jam in the past two years, and who, as Neal recalls, met the group when he randomly showed up at a Mercury Lounge gig in 2008. ( “All of a sudden, there’s Warren Haynes. We’re obviously all fans [of his],” Neal says.)

Another supporter is Soulive’s Eric Krasno, who has become a public cheerleader of the Souls on Twitter and a notable sit-in guest. As Neal remembers it, the band saw Krasno at Christmas Jam but didn’t interact with him until the members of Soulive breezed through the Lovin’ Cup Café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the Souls were regulars.

“We’re in the corner playing and Soulive walks in,” St. Hillaire recalls. “And they’re just hanging out. They weren’t there to see us or anything – I think they knew the owner – but we were there.”

Nash laughs: “They jammed with us, I think.”

“And really, just us,” Matsuyama underscores. “They would come up, and then someone would sit out and that person would become the whole audience.”

Then, there’s the producer Ethan Johns. Famous for his work with Ray LaMontagne, Ryan Adams, Kings of Leon and plenty of others, Johns was a word-of-mouth fan who contacted the band in May 2009 about recording an album. In a two-week span last fall, The London Souls finished its debut at Abbey Road Studios in London.

“What’s funny is that when we went over there, [Johns had] been listening to a whole album’s worth of earlier stuff of ours that we had no intention of recording,” St. Hillaire says. “He had all these ideas about what could go where and we came in with a different sound.”

Neal says that the band previewed the new material for Johns on the first night was in town at a local bar in London. “He was [still] down,” Neal the guitarist chuckles. “We passed.”