Your CD is good, but your live show is awesome. I have friends who have been begging me to come out since forever. And finally, I got to see the real deal.

That's kinda been our thing all along. It's gotten a lot of people out to see us, we really go for it live. I'm glad you liked it, glad that it came through.

Definitely came through, though I have to question Martin coming out on stage without a shirt.

(laughs) Yeah, that's not very indie is it?

Well, let's just say he needs to develop a physique.

Yeah, it's very boyish isn't it? We were just discussing this today, since we are going on tour. I really sweat like pig, and we are going out for 30 days. I can only bring so many shirts, and with a show a night, what am I gonna do? I can't stay in these sweat soaked shirts. So I thought, do I want to play shirtless? I'm not sure I want to send that message. So, I don't know.

Well, you can hang it out the window of the van when you're on the highways.

Good idea, I can wash it in the sink after the show.
  Speaking of the tour, The WSC isn't really touring with anyone on this trip?

Well, we're playing with this band called The Pleasure Club , I think it's 10 shows with them, and then a few shows with Maritime , maybe 3 or 4, but most of the time we are out on our own.

You guys are playing some cool venues: Emo's in Austin, The Middle East in Boston . Plus you've played some great places already, like the Mercury Lounge in NYC.

Yeah, some good shows, this tour should be good, some good venues. For me it's all about the drum monitors. That's my definition of a good club. If they're good, great. If not, it's a hack show.

So mics don't matter?

Nah, its all about how loud they can make my kick drum in my monitor.

We're writing the review of your album as we speak?

If you need some help, or any adjectives, just let me know.

?regarding your sound, we write about a lot of bands, and the writers tend to have very black and white labels -- this is a garage band, this is a power-pop band etc. I've read a lot of different descriptions of your music. You're playing The Warped tour this year, and they label you as a punk band. I'm really not sure how punk you are.

I think there are elements of punk in our music. But that's just a writer's thing. It all depends on the person; people with different backgrounds are gonna categorize it differently. We've had some times when older dudes have come up to us and said, ?Fuck yeah!! You guys remind me of the Ramones .? And we're like ?the Ramones?? We get a lot of different stuff. We get that question a lot: ?Who are your influences?' We just do what we do. That might be a trite answer, but we sound like what we sound like. We got reviewed in the Washington Post and the guy cited three of our influences and we all sat around and asked each other, ?Do any of us own these albums?? I had never even heard of the bands he listed, how could I be influenced by them?

Damn professional journalists.

I don't put much stock in it. I don't mind being called punk, or indie, or pop; garage rock whatever, it doesn't matter to me. We're just making music.

Well just being different is a positive nowadays.

Totally. We think we're gonna do great on the Warped tour. We've played some other festivals where we really didn't fit in, we felt so out of place.

Well, lots of different bands at Warped, lots of pop-punk and stuff.

Oh yeah, Ima Robot is playing, and they're not Punk.

And then there are bands like Bad Religion.

I'm looking forward to it, I think it will be a lot of fun. I don't care what kind of baggage the Warped tour has with it. We're gonna be playing to a shit load of kids, and we're gonna reach some of them, and others will think we suck, whatever.

Let's talk about Evan.

Evan Featherstone?

I remember the first time I looked at your website, it was probably a year ago. There was a mention that you were playing with this one guy, and he was about to become the fourth member. You'd been playing for awhile at that point. How'd that come about?

Well, Marty wanted to free himself up a little, to concentrate on singing more. We wouldn't let him dump the guitar completely, which he really wants to do. So we thought it would be a good idea to get somebody else in there to fill it out, so Marty doesn't have to worry about it. Marty really rocks it out live, we all do. And sometimes when you're swinging for the fences you're going to miss notes, but if you've got someone there to fill it out, its ok. Plus, Evan's an amazing talent. He's incredible, he's a great guitarist, and a drummer. He sings, plus he fits in very well with us personally. So it was a no brainer.

And was there an audition?

Marty met him at a party. His band, the Throwing Stars , were playing a basement at some house-party Marty was shacking up in, and he met him there. Later he asked him to come over and play with us.

Seeing you guys on stage, he definitely plays the role of the rock star.

He's got the vibe? the mojo.

He didn't play without a shirt, but?

There has to be some standards, some standards of decency.

I assumed that would be Olivia, but perhaps not. She had a really nice cape on at the show, that she managed to keep on the entire time.

Well you can't take the cape off.

Let's talk about the EP versus the new album, Catching Looks . Obviously the EP was much more do it yourself.

The EP was all do it ourselves, we financed the whole thing. We recorded the EP in two days, very early on in our young career. We had a lot more time to do the album. We recorded up in Philadelphia with Brian McTear. We actually stayed in his studio for a month. We really took our time. I've never had the luxury of really spending as much time as you need. It was a joy to me, because you could actually spend as much time as you need getting drum tones. It was a lot of fun, and an incredible experience. As a result everything is flushed out. The production quality is better, we really made the tunes as good as we could make them.

Was Evan there for the recording?

No, he didn't play on the album. Our buddy Ryan from the Poconos played some leads for us.

Why the decision to re-record songs from the EP as opposed to new material?

I personally wanted to have better recorded versions of some of those songs. And I think the time between the EP and album, we had flushed it out a bit, just playing all the shows. While the songs kinda were the same, we made a lot of improvements on them. Marty in particular had a lot of ideas and things he wanted to round them out and take them to the next level. The three songs that made it over, depending on the version you have, we felt those were too good to leave on the EP and never re-record.
  The EP I have is an 8-song EP.

Yeah, the first 5 songs on that were recorded up in Maryland . There's a live track from The Velvet Lounge. We did a rough ? really rough ? version of ? Dead Kid Town .? And then ?River and the Road?, which Marty and I did in my basement. With two SM58's, so we wanted to re-record that with some quality equipment.

?River and the Road? is clearly your folk song.

Yeah, it's a bit of a departure. It's a really beautiful tune, a bit of the sore thumb on the album. But it's a good tune, and it works first and foremost, and that's what its all about. People listen to that album, and after the first 5 tracks, they're gonna think we are this kinda band, or this kinda band, but if you listen to the whole album, our range as musicians really becomes apparent, so it was important to put that song on there.

Versatility is a good thing.

Yeah, there is a lot of talent in the band, so it would be foolish for us to record an album full of two and a half minute, four on the floor, poppy punk songs.

Are you guys all full-time musicians?

Yes we are.

Must have been all the money from the recording contract.

(laughs) I owe a great deal to my wife and her commitment.

DC is full of little ?scenes' on the web -- ArlingtonMusicScene.com, 703, Local 221, pheer.com, etc. -- but you are part of a growing group of successful DC bands that really don't take part in all that mega self-promotion. I'm not even talking about all the Dischord- related bands, but yourselves, The Carlsonics, Phaser, etc., it seems like word of mouth is your main promotion tool.

Yeah, we have been blessed with good word of mouth. Even early on with our shows at the Grog, we had an immediate reaction with people. And that was a realization for us, that maybe there was something more here than just what we were doing in the basement. Word of mouth is where it's at.

It fascinates me, that so many bands whore themselves out to mass marketing (and I'm not saying that's a bad thing), but it frequently gets them nowhere. I have some flyers in my bag for shows I never even thought to go to. I've never seen a WCS flyer myself?

That's cause we don't flyer! Not anywhere near as much as we should.

Did you in the beginning?

No, that's kinda always been our Achilles heal, in the promotion area. We're musicians, not marketers. Every once and a while we get our shit together, like for the CD release party we got some flyers and put them up, which I think is the first time I've even done that. We just don't think of that stuff, that's what managers do. And hey, bands that do do it, more power to them. I'm proud of the fact that it wasn't flagrant self- promotion that got us to where we are today, it was that people liked our music.

Talk about your opinions on the DC scene? Or the lack there of..

Oh I think there is one. You hear people talk about the lack of a scene, but it's kinda not very cohesive. Still, a lot of great bands. When you normally think of a ?scene' you associate it with a group of bands all doing the same type of sound, or from the same general area. But DC is a big town, and the music is not cohesive in a sense that there's a lot of bands and its not like everyone's hanging out or going to each others shows. And people see that and say there is no scene. But there's a shit load of great bands, Trans Am, The Apes, Phaser, us, Carlsonics, Army of Me, there are so many bands that are doing it. But my biggest problem is that I just don't think that the local media is really promoting the DC scene. They don't cover it. The Washington Post is getting better, but the City Paper is lacking in my opinion. And like it or not, at least for the general public's perception, you need people covering the scene. I mean it can exist on its own, but no one is gonna start viewing it as a scene until the papers start calling it a scene or the radio stations start calling it a scene. It will exist in its own way, at least to the musicians, but you have to have someone writing about it, writers going to shows, and promoting bands that are out. And in my opinion, that's what's lacking. The bands are there=., but no one is going out to the shows. When I was in Detroit , the weeklies promoted the hell out of the White Stripes and the Demolition Doll Rods . And not only did they cover them, but they championed them as well. They really got behind them, and said these guys are it, come check them out. A perfect example, our CD release party was a few Fridays ago, and the City Paper's never done anything on us. And that week in the City Paper there was an article about the band from NYC (The Hold Steady) that we asked to open up our CD release party, but not us. That right there to me says it all. Other papers have been great -? to us. The Post has been great to us. Joe Heim has been great. But, they like us, so they write about us. Now, if certain writers don't like us, that's fine. But I can't believe that there aren't any bands in the city that they like. Don't get me wrong, we love The Hold Steady, and are happy they're getting some press, we just found it funny that it was our release party and we didn't get a mention. You know, 550 people were there to see us, and they wrote about the opening band that had never played DC before. That's the mentality.

Did they at least add at the end, in parentheses ?playing with WSC??

Yeah, some ?also playing?? mention. I got a laugh out of it. .

While the City Paper is no Village Voice or even a Boston Phoenix, its not bad. Do you think i'ts just their perception that there is nothing here?

I really don't know. The On Tap people wrote a nice little piece about us. It's getting better.

Are you guys really into technology, laptops and iPods?

I want to get an iPod, but I'm waiting for the right opportunity. It's tough to justify $300 when you're not really working. So if anyone from Apple reads this, and wants to send me one, I will plug it like a whore.

And I can say the same for BigYawn.

Yes, for the love of sweet Jesus, send us iPods!

Back to the band? who is the leader, the main writer?

It's Marty totally. He's the main song-writer, pretty much the only song-writer. We are just starting to work stuff out as a band a lot more. But Marty would always come in with stuff, and sometimes it would be flushed out, other times not. But we would just keep playing it and playing it until it arrived. But Marty is definitely the creating force behind the songwriting. We kind of push and pull and add shape with our ideas, but he comes up with the melody. He's just a great songwriter. And very prolific.

DC's own Rivers Cuomo?

Well, let's just say he's got our next 6 albums worked out already.

Now Marty was the force behind forming the band too, right?

He came back to DC from Vassar with Olivia intent on starting something. And soon after they put an ad in the paper looking for a drummer, and that's how it happened.

It's interesting, with one main songwriter, you'd think you'd get more of the singer-songwriter vibe from the band, but you don't at all.

Marty could do that if he wanted to, but we all add an explosiveness to his music, and I think that really fires him up, which in turn fires us up. It is a very symbiotic relationship.

Speaking of explosive, ?Breaking the Dawn,? good on the CD, but it gets its justice live. Fucking ridiculous wham bam thank you maam closer?

Yeah, that's what we were intending. We've always gotten a really great response to that song live. I remember one time we were playing at the Velvet Lounge, and the floor boards were shaking, people really get into that song.

It's funny you mention that, the whole dance vibe that you guys have? there's no mixer in the back, no Rapture like dance beats, but it is still very danceable.

Totally. If it makes you move, go for it. I mean, as a drummer, when we first got together and were jamming on some of these tunes, they fired me up, they made me wanna pound on my drums, and I kinda drum like I'm dancing anyway, all thrashing around and stuff. I've heard these songs more than anyone, and I still get fired up to play them. If I wasn't in the band, I'd still go to the shows and dance? all while criticizing the drummer of course.