When Beast Make Bomb settled into a cozy corner on the top floor of Georgetown’s pristine business school building, they were itching to finally play a song free of interruption.  Their first attempt in Dahlgren Square proved near perfect, aside from the earth-trembling twelve o’clock chimes of the neighboring clock tower.  On the second try, we secured permission from the kind folks at Uncommon Grounds to play inside the café, a venue that turned from humble to nightmarish once the coffee grinders went on in full force.

Undeterred, we led the Brooklyn quartet over to the Rafik Hariri Building to play a lovely tune amongst the business school’s suit-clad professionals.  As lead singer Ceci Gomez belted out the final “Ooo’s” of the song, however, a woman in a fuchsia suit and a temper to match stormed over to our crew to demand that we stop the show immediately.  Apparently, the business school’s board of advisors didn’t care for rock n’ roll.  Stifling giggles, we apologized and went out front to greet lax bros, MBA candidates, and undergrad students alike with one last song as they entered the building.

Eager for their 9:30 Club show with The Whigs, the band thanked us for the borrowed guitars and slipped out of sight into misting rain.  A day of setbacks and delays couldn’t stop the music.

Camera + Crew: Scott Lensing + Dan Stokes

Pitchfork described Oh No Oh My’s first album as a successful example of the “half-serious, half-goofball indie shtick.” Daniel Hoxmeier, one of the band’s four members, claimed that the thought behind that album was “write a bunch of songs, put ‘em on a CD-R, and hopefully clubs will let us play.” That plan worked, with the band opening for the likes of The Flaming Lips and Gnarls Barkley, among others, and landing a spot in the 2006 Lollapalooza line up. But the band seems to write Oh No! Oh My! off now as an insignificant and illegitimate musical endeavor. I cannot really shake the impression that this response reflects the loss of innocence point of just about any coming of age story. The band looks back on its goofy, fun, and ultimately well-written songs like “I Have No Sister,” “Jane is Fat” and “Lisa, Make Love! (It’s Okay!”) as child’s play in comparison to People Problems. I’m not so sure that’s the case.

People Problems is much more serious lyrically, and generally sounds more refined instrumentally than Oh No! Oh My! – the work of fellow Austin indie rockers Spoon’s sound engineers Jeff Byrd and Brad Bell definitely had something to do with this refinement – but the band hasn’t lost its love for upbeat melodies. This often leads to a bizarre juxtaposition of happy tunes and twisted lyrics, like on “So I Took You,” a two-minute tale that at first seems romantic and pleasant, with high-pitched vocals and speedy, cheerful guitar strumming that make you think of warms days on the beach. But just when you start to feel comfortable, Oh No Oh My hits you with the twist that the man is really a “knife-wielding pervert.” “Brains” is another good one, chronicling a man’s mental decline into ambiguity set to a backdrop of steadily building percussion. It is in these narrative twists that we can still see the creativity that Oh No Oh My used to reflect through sonic experimentalism (like the melding of folksy hand-claps and techno beats in “I Have No Sister”).

Hoxmeier is quick to categorize that experimentalism of old as simple immaturity, but Despite People Problems’s more refined sound leading to a more complete and intriguing album than past releases, I still feel that it could use a little of the funky spontaneity that Oh No Oh My seems to feel it is has now grown past. Hoxmeier describes the album as “a juxtaposition of ‘my life is over’ and ‘my life is just beginning.’” This is a fitting description, considering the fact that the album seems to mark the end of the excitement(!)-filled days of the band and the beginning of a more developed, but also less adventurous era in Oh No Oh My’s musical progression. Basically, Oh No Oh My is, in fact, grown up, but I can’t help feeling a little sentimental about it.

– Dan Stokes, Co-Host of The Weak End Edition, Fridays 4-6pm.

Fergus & Geronimo defuse the heaviness of their subject matter with jest, by printing “You still buy CD’s?” in all capital letters across the front of the disc and directions on the back cover – “Place in cargo shorts side pocket and continue browsing. Walk out whistling” – but their message seems ultimately sincere.

“Wanna Know What I Would Do If I was You?,” the second song on “unlearn”, is the one that I find myself returning to the most. Maybe it is the whimsical recorder underlying the first half of the song that reminds me of my third-grade music class, or the fact that the vocals are the closest on the album to, in the words of my sister, “the white man sing-talking” sound that I can’t help but enjoy. Regardless, the song’s ability to skirt, blend, and redefine musical genres – interweaving traces of psychedelic rock and indie folk, among others – and to still give the impression, through washed-out vocals, that Fergus & Geronimo’s musical effort is only halfhearted, captures the mood of the album perfectly. Other songs to look out for include rhythmically latino-inspired, bongo-infused, “Where the Walls Are Made of Grass,” and  “Unlearn,” the title track, which, lyrics aside, sounds like it could have come straight off of the Grease soundtrack.

These songs demonstrate Fergus & Geronimo’s willingness to take themselves only semi-seriously, playing with ideas and pitting conflicting sounds against each other, like the battling kids from War of the Buttons who inspired the band’s name. It is precisely this lighthearted attitude that gives their message legitimacy. The meaning of “unlearn,” they explain, boils down to this: “Your mind is a sponge, and sponges gotta be squeezed.” We buy it because they joke; they don’t impose their message on us, but instead give us the choice to just laugh it off.

– Dan Stokes, Co-Host of The Weak End Edition

I have to say that after interviewing Richard Edwards, the lead singer of Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos, I was expecting his nonchalance (verging on the drugged out) to lend itself to a pretty low-energy live set. Instead I got a solid performance, sonically charged and inevitably a little depressing lyrically. Even more surprisingly, I got a few fist pumping bros who knew all of the words to every song. Who knew that Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos had such a dedicated fan base on the Jersey Shore?

Not all of those present were quite so committed to the band – I overheard one guy asking his friends which of the band members “Margot” was – but in general the crowd seemed to be enjoying Edwards’s high-strung vocals and the bands eclectic combination of smoother melodies (at one point inducing a surprisingly well executed slow-dance) and bro-jumping jams.

Margot pulled heavily from their newest release, Buzzard, with an especially note-worthy performance of “Birds,” but also mixed in a few classics from Animal and even The Dust of Retreat. The Black Cat with its dark and dingy mystique, reminiscent of Bruce Wayne’s workshop in Batman Begins, ended up being an ideal match for Margot’s ominous guitar riffs and gloomy lyricism, and I left feeling fully satisfied, if rather confused, by my unexpectedly intriguing concert-going experience. Although now, in hindsight, I don’t know why I expected anything less the sundry crowd that matched so perfectly with Margot’s distinctive chamber-pop meets Kurt Cobain eclecticisms.

Camera: Charlotte Japp

Interview and Edits: Dan Stokes