The Serious Geniuses

By Chris Brook

Photo by Erin Yunes

Cozied up in a booth at the Middle East with the four members of The Serious Geniuses, Dan Wilder, the band’s drummer, holds a squeeze bottle of ketchup over his head and squirts it on a hamburger below. Guitarist Sam “Nip” Phinizy smears the red condiment over a bun, laughing, while a smile slowly curves out from under his tousled beard.

It’s a tired journalistic cliché to pigeonhole bands as just wanting to have fun and play music. However, if Boston ever needed a poster band for this, it seems The Serious Geniuses wouldn’t have a hard time filling the role.

Rounded out by vocalist/guitarist Paul Cummings and bassist Josh Hoey, the band play a refreshingly potent take on post-punk, rife with pop sensibilities and ferociously up-tempo chords.

The band pits its sound somewhere between ‘90s pop punk and ‘90s indie rock, treading the territory of garage rockers Superchunk, Small Brown Bike and Archers of Loaf.

While Phinizy and Wilder had played around together for fun in the past, it wasn’t until June 2006 when they acquired Hoey (ex-Lock and Key) that the band played its first show.

“There were only 12 people there,” recalls Nip of the show at Allston’s now-defunct Reel Bar, but it wasn’t until they began playing frequent basement shows to friends that the Geniuses hit their stride.

Keeping up with the not-so-serious ethos, the band borrowed the title of their first record from a line of a record review of local Boston punks Witches With Dicks. Deemed You Can Steal The Riffs But You Can’t Steal The Talent, the 10-song LP will see a release in March courtesy of Florida’s Kiss of Death records.

Recorded at Project Sound in Haverhill, Mass., Talent was done all on half-inch tape over a handful of weekends in November. Cummings asserts the record is poppier than the band’s previous work. While older tracks like “Bacon Strip Band Aid” feature shouted melodies that strain Cummings’ voice, on the new recordings he promises “more dynamic” vocals and “enough variation to keep [the songs] interesting and cohesive.” Still present on the new LP is live favorite “Marc Attack,” a herky-jerky three-minute meltdown of riffs that build up only to come crashing down.

To coincide with the LP’s release, the band plans on road testing the new material in March by touring beneath the Mason-Dixon, hitting Richmond, Florida, and New Orleans. The band plans to tour alongside fellow Boston brethren Bread and Roses, a roots-rock band whom they not only share a tour van with, but a drummer, Wilder.

The songs that wound up on the full-length were going to be recorded regardless of label help, according to Cummings. If the band hadn’t landed on Kiss of Death, the songs were going to come out on Hoey’s Allston bedroom label, Clubhouse Records. In the last few years Hoey’s put out records for friends like Mean Creek, InBlackandWhite and Movers and Shakers.

Clubhouse also served up The Serious Geniuses’ first recording, a split 7-inch with their friends in the equally energetic Jean Claude Jam Band.

By the time the four Geniuses move from their booth to the stage, the Middle East Upstairs has sold out. The 200 bodies compactly pressed together convey a far different feeling than their first few basement shows. While the four enjoy the happenstance of a label signing and the crowds, Cummings emphasizes that just having a good practice can speak volumes about how successful your band is doing.

“All of those things like getting signed and touring are great but sometimes just having a really good practice feels great.”

Nip, likewise, is perfectly content with just having a good time, fearing bands that get too caught up in the gears of the music business.

“I’m going to do this until it’s not fun anymore and then I’m going to stop,” he says.

www.seriousgeniuses.com