By Sean Moeller

Last Thursday, Matt Sharp lost his car to a flying piece of rubber from a shedding 18-wheeler he was following on the Los Angeles highway. He sent the poor banged up thing to the repair shop and was left helpless and trapped in his residence, feeling the walls closing in.

“It’s going a little rough,” he said. “I’m stranded.”

The Rentals main man, former Weezer bassist and only breakout star (Pat Wilson’s Special Goodness and Brian Bell’s Space Twins make this a simple claim) complicates his life further with the company he keeps. When he’s not taking his vehicle to a mechanic, he’s taking his pals to the doctor. If only he just didn’t neglect those friends for years and years, leave them to leisurely gather dust. Synthesizers have feelings too, but as Matt Sharp rambled off to rustic Leiper’s Fork, Tenn., to make solo recordings with his acoustic guitar, he abandoned his menagerie of Korgs and Moogs and their cousins. Now, as Sharp tries to roust them from their seven-year slumbers, he’s finding that they’re grumpy, much grumpier than a car can ever get.

“I’m sans kicking back at the moment,” he said. “We’re visiting the synthesizer doctor on nearly a daily basis. These synthesizers have a mind of their own. They decide how they want to work and when they want to work.

“Some of them I’ve used in spots over the years, but this Moog Source I have—which I recorded with on the last Tegan and Sara record—was kind of one of the only ones that was dusted off.”

Sharp describes his synthesizers and their mood swings the way you might color commentate a Jack Hanna appearance on Letterman or Leno. They sound like lemurs and chimpanzees that go potty where they’re not supposed to, get cranky without explanation, go haywire at the drop of a hat and refuse cooperate unless there’s a stream of bottle milk going down their gullets. Most of it’s just a freakout.

“They’re total characters. They have their own idea of what needs to go on. They’ll just be like, ‘I don’t feel like doing that right now. I’m going to do this.’ Sometimes that’s a good thing and you say, ‘Okay, do that. I’ve never heard that before.’ It’s an anxiety I’m happy to not be totally in charge of. They’re all temperamental and I don’t know if they like you bringing a new friend into the room.

“It’s amazing that any of them still work at all. We were talking about it the other day how when I first bought most of these keyboards, they were probably 20 years old and now they’re all about 35 years old.”

The real return of The Rentals is essentially a return of these cagey, senior citizen-aged machines that oscillate and wiggle like earthworms avoiding a hook and a return of Sharp to his days of bouncy, blooming, message lost in this machino, harder living, harder falling out of love lyrical days.

Sharp was patient in his reconstitution of the band that, in 1995, told us that if we’re friends of P, well, then we’re friends with them and if we’re down with P, well, then we’re down with them. He wanted former that dog! bassist Rachel Hayden to join him in the reformation and rebirth. Hayden, whose sister Petra (who now stands beside Colin Meloy of The Decemberists on stages around the world) was in the band during its recording and touring behind the debut album “Return of the Rentals,” was the first person that Sharp ever played Rentals songs for back in the early 90s. Sharp’s been known to call Hayden the purest singer he’s ever heard and there were moments with Petra, in the recording of sophomore album “Seven More Minutes,” where he felt that he was getting close to how he wanted to use her sister to accentuate the new sound of The Rentals.

“The last song on that record (“Jumping Around”) was the first one we worked on where I thought, ‘If I had to do it all over again, this is where I’d start from,’” Sharp said. “(Rachel’s) the one person I wanted to work on these songs with. I kind of closed my eyes and crossed my fingers when I went to bed at night, hoping that she would agree to do it.”

Hayden had lent contributions to all of the songs on “Return of the Rentals” before Sharp revisited the songs, rewrote some of the lyrics and re-recorded them. When the album was finished she was only heard on the song “Move On.” Sharp’s glad to have her along for this installment of a band that he intends to keep running for a long time. No more hiatuses or dryspells. No more sojourns to the Tennessean backwoods (Leiper’s Fork is made to sound much more remote than it really is, located just outside Nashville) for reconnecting with the soul.

“When we were recording the first two records, if you were within shouting distance of the studio, you might have found your way onto the record. I was on the road with Weezer so much at that time that there was no way to think about (The Rentals) in family terms,” he said. “Recording like that didn’t interest me anymore. I wanted this to be a group of people who felt we were investing in something. It’s where I’m at in my life now. I wanted to get a chance to watch these people and see where we might go.

“We’ve been working together this past year (Sara Radle on multiple instruments, Ben Pringle on synths, Lauren Chipman on viola and vocals and Dan Joeright on drums) and we’ve worked on quite a bit of new material, but we’re just taking baby steps.”

(The Rentals kick off a nationwide tour with fellow comebackers Ozma Sunday in Solana Beach, Calif.)