I’m About as Close to Making Sense as I’m Ever Going to Get (We Are Scientists/Oxford Collapse, Bowery B’room)

I walk my dog three times a day in Prospect Park.  Yes, he needs the exercise (as do I, as do I), but the immediate goal is that he take a shit.  At least one.  During the longest outing, in the morning, he’ll go at least twice (and once, four times, but there was a stomach virus involved, and I’d rather not discuss that week).  And I, conscientious citizen, slavishly trail behind with a fistful of baggies, plucking poo from the green and carefully depositing it in giant round barrels that are filled with other bitty bags of other dogs’ output.

Nothing bothers me more, as a dog-owner, than to see that someone has not picked up after their pet.  Actually, no, that’s not true:  Nothing bothers me more than STEPPING in something someone should have picked up.  But seeing it is enough.  How DARE such-and-such neglect their responsibility.  They should be, at the very least, stripped of their dog.  I harbor fantasies of feeding these people the offending pile of poo.

Yes, this is my review of the We Are Scientists concert.  Bear with me.

Occasionally I’ll find myself in a far corner of the park where no one but a dog would wander – there are off-leash hours, and dogs run willy-nilly about; while bent over, scooping up shit, I’ll sometimes spy some poo from yon-day-gone-by that is very happily decomposing on its own.  And those are times I think I’ve got it all wrong:  I’m aiding in the manufacture of individually-wrapped pieces of shit, pollution preserved for posteriority.  My dog is good for, let’s say, four bags every twenty-four hours.  Multiply that by the number of dogs that dally daily in Prospect Park and you get... a WHOLE LOT of little plastic bags of shit.  Biologically, it’s a peculiar catastrophe... but a fairly necessary one.  All these baggies are keeping the Long Meadow from becoming an acre of manure in the middle of Brooklyn.

We Are Scientists are little plastic baggies, and Styrofoam cups, and disposable diapers.

Non-metaphorically, We Are Scientists are a trio of musicians – Keith Murray (vocals/guitar), Chris Cain (bass), and Michael Tapper (drums) – who met in college in Southern California six years ago.  They came to New York a year later, and – after toying with their sound over the course of three self-released EPs – are now about to conquer what’s left of commercial radio with their major-label debut With Love and Squalor.

I’m surprised to find myself liking Squalor as much as I do.  If you listen to the older WAS material – and you can download it all here – you can hear that the band has buffed its power-pop tendencies up with a trendy post-punk jangle and shorn off its geekiest edges (old titles included “The Nature of Empirical Truth,” “Ode to Star L23,” and “Mothra vs. We Are Scientists”).  The evolution seems less the work of scientists than marketing executives, and people are right to be suspect of a group that seeks to be the Next Big Thing with That Week’s Sound (Skabba the Hutt, anyone?).

But while everything on the new CD seems like it’s been done before – some party-pooper’s probably ardently mapping its genome as we speak – it’s good, solid pop.  Squalor is chock full of what the old record folk called “singles.”  “Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt,” “Cash Cow,” “The Great Escape,” “Lousy Reputation” – any or all of these should soon be blaring out of a Top 40 outlet near you.  TRL – does that still air? – ninnies can ooh-and-AAAAAAAAAAH! over Murray’s sweetie-pie mug.

I’d been reading about them on area blogs for a while – Yeti is always raving about their live sets – and figured I should see them before they’re selling out Roseland.  While a poor recent performance on Letterman (watch(wmv, via)) – where the six-year-old band couldn’t manage to stay together, rhythmically – gave me second thoughts, I was willing to chalk it up to nerves.

Turns out they can’t.  Stay together, rhythmically.  Or don’t want to.  And I’m kind of all for that.

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Murray is dreamboat material.  Built like a twig, he’s got doe-eyes, a frighteningly perfect smile and hair that may have at one time seen water.  It’s his stage, his show, his band.  His voice may not have a wide range, but it’s fairly exact and confident.  He manages to pull a huge snarl of sound out of that guitar.  The other two are sloppy seconds.  Bassist Cain, who took the stage wearing what looked like protective eyewear and cracked a few minor, endearing jokes – looks like a high school chemistry teacher.

That the band falls out of sync so often would seem to indicate a problem with the rhythm section... but as the show went on it became obvious that it was Murray’s fault.  Whenever he steps away from the microphone, he pushes the tempo out of whack; the other two play catch-up as best they can, but neither seems willing to break routine and drop notes/beats to get there.  It’s hardly Jack-Meg White at work, here.  I like Murray’s instinct – fasterfasterfaster – and I like that he seems intent to rub cracks into his rock-solid pop songs... but it comes off a bit clumsy.  A little more planning, or a more intuitive rhythm section, perhaps.

They played just over an hour, and included a sloppy-but-enjoyable cover of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.”  Songs flowed smoothly into one another, no major detours were taken.  “Callbacks” rocked the hell out.  But no, there was nothing truly transcendent.  Nothing extraordinary.

But something has to be popular, and it might as well be this.  It’s disposable, but solidly constructed and unassuming.  If you were so inclined, you could call We Are Scientists derivative, or useless, or insincere.  They were probably called worse in high school.  But having this stuff come so effectively, likeably packaged is a hell of a lot better than wading through an acre of shit.

(Interviews with Murray at Script and You Ain't No Picasso.)

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Oxford Collapse has an awful drummer.

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