Sound zero

>> But Athens, GA’s I Am the World Trade Center
are still standing

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

There’s a song on their first album, which came out in July 2001, called “September.” It’s track 11. Could things suck any harder for Dan Gellar and Amy Dykes? Well, yes. There’s no such thing as bad press, and they’ve got plenty. Their groovy laptop sophomore disc, The Tight Connection, is out July 23 on Kindercore, the stellar little label co-founded by Gellar. They’re on tour, singing and dancing up a storm. The Mirror spoke to an upbeat Gellar about the ’80s, the hate mail and the Anthrax.

Mirror: Any regrets?
Dan Gellar: The name really means a lot to us, and even if we named our band that today, we would mean nothing negative by it, it just happens to be a sequence of words that freak people out. I did regret that we happened to choose one of two band names in the world that might require you to change it under those circumstances—the other one being Anthrax.

M: They didn’t change their name, either.
DG: Yeah. Initially, they posted this thing on their Web site saying, “We changed our name to Basket of Puppies” or something, that was their first reaction, but then they had a big show in New York where they wore jumpsuits that said, “We’re not changing our name.” They got a ton of press over that, it was really funny watching it go down. We didn’t make the decision until after they did. They’ve been around for 25 years, so once they set the precedent it was a lot easier for us to say, “Yeah, we’re gonna keep ours, too.”

M: What’s the most absurd reaction you got?
DG: The weirdest thing, and this totally doesn’t make sense to me, even today, were the anti-American e-mails from other countries. I don’t want to go into it too much and aggravate the situation but we had angry Americans and then there were these get-out-of-my-country people, and it was like, “Come on now, you can’t all be mad at us.” I don’t think we would have sold too many records to those people anyway. Ultimately, they weren’t going to become fans—or maybe they did, who knows.

M: So your new album is a big production turn-around.
DG: On the first album, I was just getting started doing computer music so I went crazy with samples. I think there were some great instrumental tracks with really ridiculously blatant samples, to the point where we wouldn’t last a week out there with those samples today. But I’ve started creating my own sounds with synthesizers and, because of the prominence of synths, the album came out sounding pretty ’80s, that’s what everyone’s saying, which is fine because New Order’s a pretty huge influence on me. At first, I was put off by the ’80s tag, then we went on tour and I started to hear it. Also, we dance a lot and I noticed that our dancing for the older songs is very ’90s-style acid house, which is where the influence for the first record came from, but for the new songs it’s very ’80s, Pretty in Pink, white guy moves. :

At Casa del Popolo on Monday, July 15, 9pm, $6

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