We Are Scientists

W.A.S. is a band with two primary, famous members: Keith Austin Murray (‘Keith’) and Christopher Ian Cain (‘Christopher I. Cain’). The two met at college in Southern California, where it’s fair to say that they both majored in ‘Babes’. Although that wasn’t technically a focus available at their college, one could definitely assert that had it been possible to do so, both Keith and Chris would have graduated with honors in ‘Babes’. Not that there was anything ‘honorable’ about the way the two went about their ‘course work’, as it were. No, they left a trail of scorched social earth everywhere they went, everywhere their ‘studies’ took them. Such was their tendency to end relationships on a sour note that by junior year they were reduced to poaching students from a high school ten minutes down the road – no one at their college would even consider a romantic entanglement with Keith, much less with Chris. Shortly after graduation, in the autumn of 1999, in a desperate shot at reinvention, Chris and Keith formed a band. The rest, as they say, happened after that. A Fantastic New Record On the new album Barbara, W.A.S. recruited Andy Burrows (former hitter-guy for Razorlight) to drum. Andy moved to New York for the summer of 2009 and began work withChrisonthatcrucialrhythmsectiontrick: theend. playing at the same time. Keith, meanwhile, decamped to Athens, Georgia, to take inspiration from the lack of New York accents, and the songs began to take shape. They recorded that fall in London, Los Angeles, & NYC. This geographical diversity could be seen as a metaphor for how disparate the three musicians are as people. Chris likes chicken, Andy likes lamb, while Keith is a vegetarian. All three appreciate beer, but sometimes, when drinking together at a pub, they order different brands. (That is rare, though.) It is a happy accident, then, that Murray, Cain, and Burrows were able to mesh their musical inclinations to such a compelling end on the songs of Barbara, a record that sees them return to the stripped-down production sensibilities of W.A.S.’s gold-selling debut, With Love & Squalor, while continuing to hone the melodic knack that has made them popular with fans and men who work for months at sea. Unlike most Americans, Chris & Keith never carry a gun, favoring instead a baseball bat with nails driven through 2010 was spent bringing a live rendition of Barbara – along with a curated selection of old favorites – to lucky audiences all over Europe, North America, and Australia. Many people generally considered “unlucky” by their friends were also at the shows.