When local frenzied-rock ensemble The Monty Yanks split up in the early days of 2009, there was only one thing left to do for lead vocalist Jason Maas: He recorded Clean, a folk-rock album with all the songs that didn’t fit the chaos-driven mantra of his previous band. It was released this fall.

“I saw the breakup as an opportunity to release a new album and go in a completely different direction,” the 29-year-old said last week over the phone from his downtown apartment. “I’ve been writing a lot of songs throughout the last five years. A lot of the songs were dirty rock songs, but some of them were of a more folky, gentle nature.”

Armed with a catalogue of tunes to choose from, Maas started looking for a capable backing band. He recruited an experienced troop of local musicians to undergird his raspy voice, including Jesse Millar, Ian Sorensen and Jen Bihun (The Experiences), along with David Singleton (The Monty Yanks) and Tim Friesen (The Shouting Ground). Nicky Mehta (Wailin’ Jennys) provided female backing vocals.

Just over a month after fronting The Monty Yanks’ farewell show, Maas and the band entered Private Ear studios in Winnipeg. The result was 11 tracks melding disparate genres such as gospel, ‘50s shake ‘n’ roll and pop into a cohesive folk record.

“The goal was to take all these genres and try to make them fit in one album. A big part of what I was trying to do was take all my influences, filter them out and then distill them,” Maas said.

All that was missing was a suitable name.

One day Maas and a few friends were hanging out and, by his own account, were already a little tipsy when they stumbled upon a magazine article.

“If you join Alcoholics Anonymous they tell you to stay away from your lower companions. They’re the people that will drive you back to your old habit. So we’re reading this article on how to tell if you’re a lower companion or not,” Maas said. “One of the questions was, ‘When you drink do you find yourself hanging out with your lower companions?’ We all looked at each other and realized, yeah, we are the lower companions.”

The band plans to give the debut some legs to stand on by taking it across the country this summer.