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 e Are Scientists' new album With Love and Squalor will feel familiar to anyone who moved to the big city to seduce Malcolm Gladwells but ended up double-fisting Pabst Blue Ribbon and passing out on the floor. The album portrays a post-collegiate stumbling into adult life: our hero is educated enough to call on the Fates but not smart enough to know when to stop drinking. WAS's tight, fast songs, simple chords and discernable vocals are perfect for pre-dance-party mode, riding the subway mode, headphones in office mode, and so on. The trio's members, Keith Murray (vocals), Chris Cain (guitar) and Michael Tapper (drums) met at college in Los Angeles and moved to New York in 2001; the band made it onto the national scene last December with a charming performance on Letterman. Hooksexup spoke with Murray as he wandered around Liverpool on a break from touring Britain. — Sarah HarrisonI saw a picture of your van and it looks like your beds are less than an inch apart. Do you guys ever end up in bed together? It hasn't happened with me yet. I can't speak for everyone else on the bus — there may have been some coupling that I wasn't aware of. Is it your perception that it's only proximity or a lack thereof that causes or prevents people from getting into bed?
Well if you're in a band and you spend so much time together, who knows what might happen? I guess that's true. The urge can be great and irresistible. But I will also say that you spend enough time with one another that the idea of also spending time unconscious together is not an option. Your time when you are unconscious is your time away from them and often your dreams are dreams of you in some kind of aircraft getting great distance from the rest of the band. When I'm awake I very happily hang out with them but the notion of privacy becomes delicious. You all went to school in L.A. What were you guys like in college? I guess we were dorks. The schools we went to were pretty small liberal-arts-exclusive nerd schools. We thought we were cool and normal but we were fucking cerebral geeks. But we had a good time. We moped around the dining hall, essentially. Who in the band gets the most girls? I'm going to go ahead and pretend that this is by virtue only of the fact that Chris and I both have steady girlfriends, but Michael gets the most girls. Well, Michael interacts romantically with the most girls. I'm not sure how much "getting" there happens to be. He does often get very drunk and very tired pretty quickly and then takes naps at the bar. How do you manage the relationship if you're touring all the time? I think it's harder for each of us as people than it has been on the relationship. When we're not seeing each other it doesn't feel awkward or distant, it just sort of sucks, and then we just end up spending a lot of time individually bemoaning that. What are your groupies like? They are tenacious and insatiable and will do anything to get at our forms. No, I think the weird thing about groupies, and maybe this is a function of my not ever indulging the endeavor of groupiedom, but interaction with groupies generally involves someone sidling up and leaning against you and then you getting in a banal conversation about the mechanics of touring and where you're going to be the next day, and then, you know, politely excusing yourself. So groupie interaction usually last about fifteen minutes and also usually takes place in really loud bars where much of the conversation is me screaming, "What?" because the music is loud and their accent is impermeable. So even if I didn't have a girlfriend, and I guess this isn't the sort of thing to be saying in an article where we're trying to bolster any mythology surrounding us, but, I'm definitely not a pick-up-a-girl-in-a-bar kind of person. What was your last day job? I worked for IFC films, the Independent Film Channel's theatrical distribution branch. It was pretty amazing and I hated to quit it. I was the last person in the band to quit my job and tried pretty hard not to, and actually went on a few tours while still keeping my job. Why was Chris the only one to take off his clothes in the "It's a Hit" video? It was luck of the draw. We rolled for it, and he got to be the one to take off his pants. I mean, that's the thing about a good pants-down joke, its subtlety. If all of us had taken off our pants, that's too much. One man taking down his pants, that's class comedy. Why is there someone in a giant bear costume chasing you down the street in your "Nobody Moves" video? A long time ago we were going to do a video where we were working in an office and we got a new boss and our boss was a bear, and only weacknowledged that he was a bear, and it worried us terribly. We never did it, the idea just seemed like it would be too ridiculous and idiotic. Our modus operandi is that we always wait incredibly long to deliver our ideas or finalized notes on things that are desperately needed by the label. So, the label had hired a production company and we still had no concept for the video, so the day before we just modified that video into something that was way more dry and nonsensical, and it was just us being chased for no apparent reason by a bear. What is "Nobody Moves" about? That song came at the end of a long period of writing a lot of songs about nothing happening. The album, in retrospect, is sort of this weird concept album about all these kids that I was friends with in New York who had gone to really good schools and were incredibly intelligent and talented and moved to New York because that was obviously the place for intelligent talented kids to go, and then moving to New York and absolutely nothing happening to them at all. I think that song was when I started moving away from that in baby steps. The essence of that song is certainly presented in a sexualized way but it's not entirely meant to be, although that is obviously the core of it. So the lyric "My body is your body, I won't tell anybody, if you want to use my body go for it" is about people not fulfilling their potential? It's about not wanting to actively take a step towards something for fear of failure, which is the link to the story I just told you, and sex. Clearly, clearly, cleary, yes, it's about that, fine. But I think there's that essential throwing up of the hands and claiming no responsibility for whatever happens to you, either in personal ambitions or sexual situations. Speaking of sex, answer a reader question: "I love getting blow jobs and I recently discovered that I don't care whether I get them from men or women. So lately I've been visiting the casual encounters section of a community website. Is this sort of behavior kosher?" I will say that yesterday I got a certificate for one free blowjob from some kids in line at an HMV. The person who gave it to me was a guy, and he handed it to me and I was like, "Oh, will you be the administrator of this?" And he sort of said, "Uh, yeah," and then walked away. And then two people later was this girl, who claimed that she had made it, and it was for me. It was sort of refreshing that really, you give anybody a one-free-blowjob gift certificate, and all boundaries go out the window: It's a free blowjob! Who cares? n°
© 2006 Sarah Harrison and hooksexup.com. |
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, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
