Friday, Mar 31, 2006

Lots going on over here in camp We Are Scientists, none of it any of your goddamn business! But we're confessional by nature, us three, and besides that we love to talk about ourselves, and besides that we're bored of this News page looking the same. Like a guy wanted by the FBI for serial murder, this News page badly needs to change its face.

Recently? Well, we played Conan O'Brien's late night talk show a couple of weeks ago. Telling character detail about Conan O'Brien:

Dave Letterman to us privately after we played our song on his show and the sound had cut out: "Thanks for coming on the show! Great job." Carson Daly: "Hey, good job. That was great." Conan O'Brien: "Wow, interesting time signature on that! ... I played a thunderbird once, actually -- they're really weirdly weighted ... So this is a '52 reissue, right? Not an original."

Then a couple days after Conan was South by Southwest. We spent a lot of time watching our friends entrance and destroy audiences all over town: Mystery Jets, Editors, The Chalets, Foreign Born, Oxford Collapse, Arctic Monkeys. We've linked to the websites of these bands in case any of them have escaped your attention -- that's why the names of them are glowing all green and blue and have lasers and lightning rocketing out of them, to indicate that they're links.

And now we're on tour with Foreign Born and The Grates. We've talked your ear off about the Foreign Born, but we've been eerily quiet on the issue of The Grates. That's because until two weeks ago we didn't know who the hell they were. Now we can think of little else. Our 70+ cumulative years of cumulative knowledge have been incinerated like tinder by The Grates' hot flame. These fucking kids, these Australian kids, have us in their grip the way a deadly spider will sometimes enwrap a Cocoa Puff in its awful hug. And thence feast rapacious.

We also, in the last two weeks, have recorded not one, not three, but TWO b-sides for the forthcoming re-release of Nobody Move. Fucking get psyched. Smash your promise ring with a hammer -- you're ours now. Not to give away too much, but each b-side will incise you from a different angle; together they will result in your guts and brains being spilled out all over your bedroom carpet. Much to the delight -- sorry to say this, but it's a fact -- of your omnivorous dog. It is a FACT.

What's really going to be a hotbed of activity in the next few weeks is our Shows page. Everybody, there's so much exciting fuzz about to go down there, it makes us quiver just to write this paragraph -- quiver in rhapsody, not, for just this once, fear or the DTs or fear of intimate contact! Like a proud, loyal cat, we will fish from the forest and leave headless on your stoop dates for shows in: Japan, Australia, Canada, every goddamn spot imaginable in the US, and a cumbersome percentage of Europe's (UK included's) festivals.

Who is the greater master:

Monday, Mar 06, 2006

"[We Are Scientists have a] complete unawareness of how dangerously close they are to being complete pricks."
- Jessica Suarez, toomanyteeth.com

Guys, we're in Munich right now, so we're a little bit late finding out about this, but holy crap, how exciting is it that Nick Sylvester, that snarky little talent-minimalist from The Voice and Pitchfork, has taken a nasty spill! We're doing our best to hide our elation but nevertheless find ourselves shouting the news from the highest peak we can access -- this website (#5 site in the entire music-related web according to NME readers! #5 on a ballot with five options!).

But so back to the horrific career crash that Nick Sylvester had that he'll never recover from: In case you haven't already read about it, it has emerged that he did that reporter thing where you make stuff up instead of doing research, did this for a Village Voice cover story, and got caught. And so now he's been suspended over at the Voice and pink-slipped at Pitchfork, and his parents are no longer talking to him and his dog growls the whole time that they're in the same room. And his fish died. And medical doctors have discovered this awful new flesh-eating virus down in the Congo and they're naming it "Nick Sylvester".

When Sylvester was a writer, he liked to write about how much W.A.S. sucks -- our music, our sense of humor; he even said our "girlfriends suck in bed" in a Voice article a few weeks back, and our "mothers cook bad". So this has to look like us taking a cheap, vengeful swipe at him -- come on, admit it! It does look that way! But what you don't realize is that, right after the editor at The Voice confronted N.S. about the bad article, N.S. walked out into the hall and keeled over! Not died, but fainted! Like a small child when you scare her really bad! And then Nick Sylvester's very own dog, who had come along for moral support, pooped right on his master's unconscious face! And everybody was laughing and filming it and streaming the whole thing live to thousands of huge outdoor IMAX screens set up in public squares all over China!

The moral here, if there is one, has to be that journalists and reviewers should never, ever write pejoratively about We Are Scientists. If they must vent negative feelings, they should cloak them in a thick blanket of bone-dry sarcasm so that most readers think the article is actually positive.