When all is said and done (that is, when the meteor finally collides with Earth, or there's a nuclear holocaust, or the scary parts of the Book or Revelation happen in a very literal sense), I'm not sure if many of the records that we compulsive music accumulators hold near and dear will really amount to anything. Maybe a few Beatles albums, Loveless, and a Leif Garrett single (just for kicks, of course) will be spared when God/nature/entropy/Dubya passes final judgment and casts the nonbelievers into a pit full of some everlasting form of pain (fire, ice, leeches, Christina Aguilera -- take your pick), but it's going to be the contents of our hearts that really separate the wheat from the chaff. Sure, your band might have packed out Emo's on one sweltering July evening or pushed 70,000 units with limited distro and no radio exposure, but those concert experiences and those liner notes are gonna burn, buddy, and so are you if you were in it for the wrong reasons and went out of your way to be an asshole to everyone you came into contact with.

If the world as we know it ever does come to such an apocalypse, I'd hope that the members of Maserati and The Mercury Program would be spared. Listen to any of the bands' records and you'll know that their complex instrumental rock opuses are labors of an undying love, communicating in tone and rhythm what words cannot even begin to describe -- and witnessing the bands live is a vivid confirmation of this fact. And apart from making great music -- a feat which, as commendable as it may be, in no way truly fills every void in a person's life (see Elliott Smith's tragic passing for an all too heartbreaking illustration) -- the members of both bands are working to unify and build friendships within the indie rock scene when most bands are content to hide behind standoffish personae. When their seven-inches go out of print and they lose their hearing Mission of Burma style, these gentlemen will still have their solid friendships and integrity (not just of the artistic sort, but of the holistic sort) to stand on.

I caught up with Maserati guitarist Coley Dennis and Mercury Program six-stringer Tom Reno in Athens a few months ago. We talked a little about touring and their recent split EP, Confines of Heat, but I'd say the evening's focus was really on two friends who were happy to be out on the road, doing what they love.

Splendid: How's the current tour going?

Coley Dennis: We just got done doing a Florida tour and it went really well. We met these guys in Gainesville last night, so this is like our second night with them. Florida was really, really good. We've never had too much luck there, but it was a really good tour. Everyone was pretty excited.

Tom Reno: This is just day two, and it's going well, because day one was hometown.

Splendid: Now, I know every night of the tour your bands will be together, but I know that there are different headliners, like, umm, Appleseed Cast is playing some times --

Tom Reno: Appleseed's actually playing most of the dates. There's tonight, Louisville, and from then on I think Appleseed's on every date except for maybe two. We don't play CMJ with them, and there's a Long Island show, yeah, so it's really two other shows -- it pretty much is a tour with Appleseed... We just did a west coast with Appleseed prior to this. Those guys are great. I see you probably feel similarly (Pointing to the Appleseed Cast T-shirt I happen to be wearing).

Splendid: (Feeling every bit the fanboy) Yeah. I got to see them last November... How's the new material sound live?

Tom Reno: It's great. I dug their music, but it never did catch me till we did a tour with them, and then when we toured and I saw how it comes across when they're playing. I ended up getting every record.

Splendid: When you're doing a tour where the lineup kinda fluctuates from night to night, is that a little bit tougher on you (because) you're not always sure what kind of turnout you'll have...?

Tom Reno: I'll field that. In some respects I think that both of our bands have played for anything from two to over a thousand people. If you keep your expectations at the bare minimum you'll be happy every night. If every night you go in expecting to have 500 people there, then you're gonna be let down, but I don't think that any of us really expect that. If tomorrow we show up in Louisville and there's only eight people, I think we'd be disappointed, but we've been in that situation and we know how to have fun with it.

Splendid: Cool. This isn't the first time that Maserati and Mercury Program have gone out, correct?

Coley Dennis: Second time? (Tom confirms this.) There was the west coast, and I think we've done a couple of one-offs and stuff.

Splendid: It feels like there's a strong relationship between the bands, especially with the EP that came out.

Tom Reno: That happened because of the mutual love between the bands. The EP didn't establish the relationship; basically, it was the other way around.

Coley Dennis: We've known you guys for, what, two years?

Tom Reno: We actually met them playing at the Engine Room (one of Athens's, shall we say, less-than-happening establishments, music-wise). They were the only people that showed up...

Splendid: (Laughing) You played the Engine Room?

Tom Reno: Gladly. This was like what, three years ago?

Coley Dennis: Dude, that was on the Vapor tour.

Tom Reno: It was the first time we'd ever been to Athens, other than to record the record. We had never played here, so it was a nightmare. We were locked in behind this cage.

Splendid: Yeah, and you've got that nice "Fueled by PBR" sign out there on the front.

Tom Reno: Yeah, other than meeting these guys it was a really bizarre experience.

Coley Dennis: People don't even know shows are going on there in the background, they just hang out. They rarely have shows there any more, because when they do, it just doesn't fly. They never even charged, ya know. People would just kinda wander in and out and not really care.

Splendid: Thinking it was some kind of cover band..

Coley Dennis: Yeah, something weird.

Tom Reno: I think there was good stuff like here and there, because I remember other friends of ours would be like, "yeah, we're playing the Engine Room," and I was like, "aw, man, I'm so sorry."

Splendid: What do you think it was that drew your bands together? Just the friendships, or a similarity in music?

Coley Dennis: I've always thought that -- I don't know how Tom feels -- like we kinda came from the same place but kinda went across the spectrum with what we did, so it's really nice play with these guys because it's a really nice contrast. It's not like the same band with the same kind of formula... I've always hated huge shows like that where it's three of the same bands, but it's really nice, especially with them. It's like a nice dynamic that really complements.

Tom Reno: What drew us together really was just them introducing themselves. They knew of us before (they) even had a record done. They were like, "so, yeah, we're in this band together," and we were obviously interested because these people were there to see us, and we got a hold of the record, and it's like, "these guys are awesome." So really, the core of it is that we both appreciate the music that the other people make. I think that now there's a friendship, but it would have been hard to go the other way just because we live so far apart. It would have been hard to know them as friends and then appreciate their music.

Splendid: That's really cool. It seems like a lot of times that bands do get to be friends first, and then they kind of have to like each other's music.

Coley Dennis: Yeah, I think that's definitely more of like a town vibe, where you kind of don't love your friend's band. You just love them after a while because you're around them so much...

Tom Reno: Which happens pretty rarely. I think this the Mercury Program's seventeenth or eighteenth tour, and there's literally five, maybe six bands that we've ever met in all those shows that we've really stayed good friends with and really love what they do. It is really pretty rare that we come across people that we're that into.

Coley Dennis: I think the circle that we all travel is pretty small, too. There's really not that many bands travelling in it. I can think of Helms, Mono, Explosions in the Sky...

Splendid: Yeah, there's not a lot of the pretty instrumental bands out there.

Tom Reno: Or just like other stuff that blows you away. You see a lot of good bands; you see a lot of bands that are doing a similar thing. And it's not that it's bad; it's just not something that really grabs you. Like the first time I saw Maserati or Explosions in the Sky or this band Helms or Mono -- those are the bands that you leave there and you're just like, "that was unbelievable." That's what's rare. Probably every night we play with pretty much one good band when we're out on our own, because there's usually two bands. One's a local, one's another touring band -- one of those is bound to be a really excellent band, but not something that's really like going to change our world.

Splendid: On this tour you actually have three very, very good bands. Do you feel like you lucked out this time?

Tom Reno: I don't know that we lucked out. I just think that because we've all been doing it for so long, we have a good circle of friends and those people making good music, and you know, just those opportunities come up a little easier the longer you've been doing it. When we all first started out, we would have felt like, yeah, this is the luckiest tour in the world, but we worked really hard to get here, and it's not happenstance. It's well-planned.

Splendid: Now with you guys in Maserati, are you really good friends with a lot of the bands you get to tour with?

Coley Dennis: Yeah, it's weird. We were talking about the small circle we travel in. Like, pretty much all the bands they're friends with, we are too. It's so unbelievably small... Once you meet people like that, when you meet a band you really fall in love with, you want to make that extra effort to keep in contact with that band from Boston, you know. It's not just about knowing a band and wanting to play with a band. When you come to town, you want to know how their life is.

Splendid: (To Coley) You and the rest of your bandmates are quite the wiffle ball players.

Coley Dennis: Yeah, we've been known to play wiffle ball a lot. These guys too.

Tom Reno: We just got our ass whipped by David Barbe, that's about it.

Coley Dennis: Because he's got the sickest pitches ever, dude. He's got like the rising -- you should see Steve (Scarborough, Maserati bassist) now, he can throw that pitch. It's like the rising fast ball, it goes up...

Tom Reno: I think Dave Barbe and Andy like to get people in the studio just so they can humiliate them. Like, "yeah, let's bring these guys in. We'll whip their ass out back."

Splendid: A lot of the Athens bands do the wiffle ball thing, right?

Coley Dennis: No, I think it's just that every band does their own little weird things to keep their sanity on the road. Like we play frisbee. It's weird because we lost Matt (Cherry, former Maserati guitarist), and Matt was like the ringer, dude. He was the beach sports king. He was great at water skiing and volleyball and frisbee and stuff... We've probably spent over a year, total, in the van with each other, and after a while you can't take it and you need a break. Little things like that are what save bands, I think -- just like pulling off to the side of the road and playing wiffle ball or something.

Tom Reno: It definitely does. And whoever you're with on tour will end up getting into it. Like, we never played football at all, and then we toured with this band Chin Up, Chin Up from Chicago, and they played football. When we were in DC with them, we ended up having this football game, and at first I was like, "Football? You guys are gonna kill me." It ended up being really fun, and now we have this championship where we bought a ring out of a gumball machine and now it passes between the bands. Whenever we see each other, it's like "Ah, you guys won it!"

Coley Dennis: That's the way it is with us and Paper Lions at wiffle ball. We were on tour with them, and we were really late to a show because it went into extra innings. It was like, "No way are we leaving, we must finish!" So we were like an hour and a half late.

Splendid: And who won?

Coley Dennis: I think they ended up beating us. They're madmen.

Tom Reno: When we played a show in Louisville with them, they kept bringing it up that they beat you. They were really proud of that.

Coley Dennis: Because Josh and Chris are just like crazy good pitchers. With us, we had a handicap because Matt sucked.

Tom Reno: He did? I thought he'd be great.

Coley Dennis: I love Matt, but he was terrible. Tristan (new guitarist) is a slugger, though, so I think we can take them now.

Tom Reno: He's from Chicago though, right, or right around that area? They're Cubbies, man.

Splendid: What did you think about the guy reaching out and taking the ball from Moises Alou last night?

Coley Dennis: I just heard about it, Tristan was telling me about it. Did this guy get, like, killed in Chicago?

Tom Reno: They escorted him out. People were throwing stuff at him, they were totally hitting him with anything they had.

Splendid: So who are you rooting for?

Coley Dennis: I'd like to see the Cubs go. I think a great World Series would be like Cubs and the Sox. The Cubs deserve it, they need it ya know... I don't want to see the Yankees win it again.

Splendid: What are the Mercury Program's favorite pastimes?

Tom Reno: We play frisbee a lot, which we sort of got turned on to by Maserati, except the last tour we were just on, the sound engineer that was with us, he bought a frisbee. He was insistent on buying a frisbee, and he takes it out of the van and the first throw, he chucks it over a twelve foot fence into some sort of high voltage area. So that was the end of frisbee for that tour, though he did get home to Chicago and send me a frisbee in the mail as an apology. So we haven't played anything in a while. We did that west coast tour and we didn't really play any games at all because the drives were like ten hours a day, so there was no goofing around at all. We usually bring a skateboard and roll around. Sander (Travisano, Mercury Program bassist) broke mine the last tour, so I don't have a skateboard anymore.

Coley Dennis: You should see my CRI deck.

Tom Reno: You have one?

Coley Dennis: Yeah, it was like this raffle at the Caledonia (Another Athens venue)... It was a listening party.

Tom Reno: They're still around?

Coley Dennis: Yeah. They put out a new record. So they put out this deck, and it's black and it has the classic CRI logo, so I put in ten bucks in raffle tickets and I won it. So the debate is, do I skate the deck or not skate the deck?

Tom Reno: I wouldn't skate it.

Coley Dennis: But see, I felt like that was a sign, ya know, like, "okay, you've got this rad deck now, you've got to start skating."

Tom Reno: Well, you should skate again, but just go get something else and keep that... 'Cause I've had a whole bunch of stuff like that, and I'd skate it, and I'd be like, "why did I just ruin this?" Because now, I don't even know what it is, and it's broken. I would have loved to have had it.

Coley Dennis: Yeah, that's true.

Tom Reno: Invariably, it's going to get broken, or get, like, totally ruined. Not that it's the greatest thing to collect skateboards, but it's still pretty cool.

Coley Dennis: Yeah, I've got it in my room.

Tom Reno: The Mike Vallely one with all the little ducks on it -- do you remember that? It was the double tail... a tail in the front, a tail in the back. I had three of those in a row, I kept buying them, and now you can't get them anymore, and I really should have kept one and hung onto it, because it's such a cool looking thing.

Splendid: So do you guys get a lot of time to hang around town when you're on tour?

Coley Dennis: No, not really, because usually it's -- we're always hard to get up in the morning, so by the time you get up in the morning, people have to eat, and you get to the show, and usually it's the routine of you get there, you load in, you find a bar and hang out, and you play the show, load in, and go to someone's house and do it all over again.

Tom Reno: We used to make more time, I think, when we were -- probably those guys too, early on when we were doing smaller tours. (An obnoxiously noisy motorcycle zips by.) Enter loud motorcycle. The tour would be three weeks, and we'd end up with like two or three days off, and it was mostly because you couldn't fill in the shows, so you ended up with these days off and you'd do stuff and you'd have things to do. Like, I think the last three tours that we've done have been like maybe over 20 days with no days off. We pretty much request to not have days off. If we had to do a six week tour, I'd rather do six weeks with no days off.

Splendid: It's cheaper that way too.

Tom Reno: Well, (to Coley) you guys make better use of your days off. You guys actually do stuff. When we have a day off we just end up sleeping most of the day away, and then we're sort of miserable that we had a day off. It kinda hurts your momentum too, especially if you had a good run. It's like once you're going you keep going, so we hardly do anything that isn't related to getting up, eating, getting to the next place and loading in.

Splendid: So who proposed the idea of the split CD? I know y'all said you got to be friends first.

Tom Reno: Originally that would be me. I thought of it at CBGB's at last year's CMJ, and I thought of somehow doing something with them -- didn't know if it would be a split or just maybe a split 7" or something. I just knew that it would be great to document both bands together, because we both record with Andy Baker here in town, and it just seemed like a really cool idea, and then I mentioned it to Coley and it just went from there. It just sort of became its own thing. Once everybody knew about it in both bands, everybody got really excited about it.

Coley Dennis: Yeah, it just kept changing, and the DVD idea came along and I was really psyched about that. All the videos turned out amazing.

Tom Reno: Yeah, it just turned out totally fun. It really became something more than we really anticipated. At first we thought it would be two songs from each band and that'd be it, it'd just be something really small, and now it's like three songs, a DVD with two videos from each band, and it became something a lot bigger than we all intended, but the timing was right to add all those extra things.

Splendid: I thought that it was definitely much better done than most EPs, with the DVD and nice cover artwork too...

Coley Dennis: Yeah, Tom.

Splendid: You did that, Tom?

Tom Reno: Yeah.

Splendid: Cool.

Tom Reno: Glad you didn't say sucky artwork. (Laughter) "Everything was cool man, but the artwork is total scheisser!"

Splendid: (Laughing) I actually enjoyed it. Do you do a lot of the artwork for the Mercury Program stuff?

Tom Reno: Yeah, I've done it for all of the Mercury Program stuff really. The Mercury Program is the hardest thing I think to do artwork for because it has to go by three other people.

Coley Dennis: They're your worst critics, too.

Tom Reno: Right, and so it's hard to even come up with an idea you'd be willing to present them. So, those things are torturous and are never really like -- I think for me they're like fairly noncreative because there's this tension that I won't be able to even present this idea. I'm like, "ah, that might be like too far..."

Coley Dennis: "That's gonna get shot down."

Tom Reno: Yeah, that's gonna be shot down. So I present really benign things I think, that I think will be accepted. But design is what I do for a living, like graphic design, web design, logo stuff, so I don't do a lot of band stuff... just because it's hard to charge any money to bands. Like I don't want them to have to pay me, I wanna do it, yet I can't devote all that time to doing it, so it's just like giving your time away. And you have to pay the bills, so you can't. It's like the stuff I really want to work on, I don't want to charge people, and they don't have any money, so it's hard.

Coley Dennis: And your time is really limited too, especially being on the road fairly often. It's like you have this big of a window to do shit, like I am with the club. I'll call them and they'll start yelling at me to do stuff, and then you have to make time. It's kinda the same thing.

Tom Reno: I'm home and I have four weeks to make a living during that time.

Splendid: Are you in business for yourself?

Tom Reno: Yeah, it's all freelance.

Splendid: (To Coley) Which club do you work at?

Coley Dennis: The Caledonia. I do the booking there, so while I'm on the road I have to keep track of it the best I can and hope everything works out, ya know.

(We have a short discussion about the upcoming Q And Not U/Black Eyes show at Caledonia, and all agree that both bands are quite good.)

Splendid: Back to the EP -- both of your bands are really detailed bands that take a lot of time to get the point across. It feels like the Mercury Program and Maserati both have so many ideas that they need that whole album to get it across -- they need that room to breathe, to have songs that don't sound that impressive on their own but that in the grand scheme of things add up to something awesome, or during the course of a live set they all come together to be really awesome. So does it feel claustrophobic when you're doing an EP? Do you feel pressured to write your songs in a bit of a different way?

Coley Dennis: We didn't. I think when they first thought up the idea, we didn't have anything. It was kind of a crash course of like, hodgepodge ideas that we just kinda had floating around that we'd worked on before tour or whatever, and we had like, I think, four new songs and we looked at them and were like, "these two would probably fit best with theirs." So we focused on them in the studio, and then there's the remix that Stewart did.

Tom Reno: I don't think that we've ever approached writing records except for -- the only one we ever approached as a whole was Vapor. That was really approached as these songs are -- they were all written within a month. At the beginning of December we had nothing, and by the end of that month we had the whole record done and ready to record it. But everything else just comes in little spurts. The songs on (the EP), one of them was started a year before we finished it, and then the other songs came together in about two weeks, so it really just depends on how our things come together. I don't think that we write full records anymore with the intention of how they're gonna feel when they're done. Hence, a lot of our difficulties in the sequencing of them, where we're back and forth a lot on where things are gonna go. We're always, like, last minute working out ideas, finishing things in the studio or completely altering an idea once you start to hear it recorded and then going, "alright, it should go like this instead." So, I don't think we approached (the EP) in that respect, like that (the songs) needed to feel cohesive at all. It was just two songs and a cover song for us. I think that you guys' side was a little different just because you had this batch of songs and then got to choose. We knew we had to finish the songs --

Coley Dennis: We saw you guys play. You played both the new songs.

Tom Reno: You heard them ahead of time? Ahhh.

Coley Dennis: Yeah, we had an idea. We're like, "yeah, okay, this is what they're doing, so we should really go with these two." Because the other two songs I don't think would have made much sense. It would have been like a little too much, it would have taken away.

Tom Reno: I don't know what the other two songs are. Did you play one of them the other night?

Coley Dennis: Yeah, the one that starts with the delay, and then the old one that we played on the last tour with the delay --

Tom Reno: Oh, okay, I would have loved that one. I love that fucking song! You've got to save that for something...

Coley Dennis: That was a cool song. Matt was going to try to teach that one to Tristan, and he's like, "dude, I don't remember what I played there. You'll just have to make up your own stuff."...

Splendid: So this great song is gone.

Coley Dennis: It's in riff heaven...

Splendid: When you're writing your albums, do you ever feel like there are certain songs that you know you're never going to play live that are just taking up space on the album, or do you always leave the possibility of working it in someday?

Coley Dennis: Sometimes. There are a couple of songs that we did on the Language record that were really hard for us to play live, and we tried a few times and it just wouldn't work.

Tom Reno: I think that's the same for us too. They weren't ever performed live before they were recorded. We would write them and we would play them at practice, and then we knew how we could record them, but some things you just can't pull off cleanly, and when you have so many songs to choose from at this point -- I mean, we have five records of songs to choose from -- those are the ones that (you don't do). People would rather see a different song that we can play well because there's a lot to choose from. And sometimes the songs that we like the most, we won't play -- like, there's a lot of songs that we think are great songs that we can't do well, or that just don't come across well live. There are a couple of songs on our latest full length, and then there's even a song that we did on the EP with them that's just a really hard song to have it come across the same way in a live setting.

Coley Dennis: Yeah, I noticed you guys didn't play that one.

Tom Reno: We did it that whole tour, and we were never comfortable. It was the one spot in the set where everyone was like, "What happened right there?"

Splendid: So how do you manage to pull it together in the studio with those songs?

Tom Reno: I think it's because they're new a lot of times. It's a brand new thing, it's really fresh in your mind, you don't know -- you have no expectation for it, so you just do it, and when it comes out you're like, "Awesome, this is great," but then trying to redo that sometimes becomes difficult.

(Mercury Program bassist Sander Travisano and drummer Dave LeBleu join us.)

Splendid: (To Coley) Whose idea was it to put a remix on the EP?

Coley Dennis: Stewart had asked for a bunch of tracks from us right after we finished the record. He was like, "I'm really, really into this. Do you guys mind if I remix some of your stuff?" He did three or four songs and we were really into what he did, and (thought they) would be cool to use at some point -- we didn't know what, like on the vinyl of that record or something. We ended up using one of his tracks and a track that his buddy did on the Japan release for that record. It's just crazy how people end up doing something like that...

Splendid: Do you think electronics are something you might pursue in the future with the band?

Coley Dennis: I don't know. I think we're kind of scared of it. We've been so purist about everything... It's definitely intriguing to me, and I think that with the way our band's working now we might possibly try that... I think we'll definitely write a different record next time, like more of a studio record.

Splendid: That'll definitely be harder to pull off live though, wouldn't it?

Coley Dennis: Yeah, definitely. You have to go back and be like a cover band or whatever.

Sander Travisano: We were thinking it would be best if we went to all computers and robots and we didn't even have to show up. Just like Man or Astroman?, we're gonna have like four TVs and mannequins and just have a via satellite monitor of them playing.

Tom Reno: Yeah, you just program it and say, "it's the same as me, I just programmed it to do that." It could be like the Blue Man Group, there could be multiple versions of us playing all over the country at once.

Coley Dennis: That's what they did with the Clone Band. They had like Clone Band A, Clone Band B...

Tom Reno: You could have a world record of like a simultaneous show in 30 cities at once...

Sander Travisano: Mercury Program's playing in every city in the US, tonight!

Coley Dennis: Think of how much money you would make, dude.

Tom Reno: And we don't even have to leave the house... We'll just do the commentary in between songs via satellite...

Splendid: Work on making it happen...

Sander Travisano: You heard it here first.

Splendid: You guys are gonna pioneer this.

Tom Reno: The thing is, we'll just have to get investors, and then we'll make all the money back by playing 30 shows at once.

Splendid: Well I've got two bucks.

Tom Reno: That'll get a finger on one of the robots.

Splendid: Well are you wanting life-like robots or can it just be a machine with the necessary finger extension?

Tom Reno: I think it should be like the Herbie Hancock video...

Coley Dennis: You could get, like, a box of arms that plays vibes...

David LeBleu: Or you could just be real abstract and hire homeless people who don't know how to play anything and just let them do it.

Sander Travisano: Make them dress up like robots!

(Much laughter)

Tom Reno: And then it would cost us nothing. It's a really feasible idea now.

(The Mercury Program members proceed to talk all at once about a homeless man who played with an instrumental band in Chapel Hill once, singing Van Halen covers or something to that effect.)

Splendid: Have you guys ever had the real temptation to really do something outlandish with one of your tours?

Tom Reno: They're all ideas like this. It's funny to say, and they're all silly ideas to talk about... Nothing that wouldn't either cost an extreme amount of money or completely end the band because no one would have any respect for you at all when you're finished doing it. (

The conversation gets sidetracked again for a few minutes.)

Splendid: Coley, I'm really curious to know what you and your bandmates listen to.

Coley Dennis: It's all pretty diverse actually. It's kinda weird that we can all play music together I think. Phil is like this pop punk drummer and loves Dave Grohl, Sonic Youth, stuff like that, and I think maybe that's kinda where we fit together. I grew up listening to a lot of DC bands and stuff, and then got into Sonic Youth and stuff like that, and it kinda changed how music (was to me)... Stevie's like a total jazz kid.

Splendid: That's always kind of a trite question, but you guys sound like you don't necessarily listen to the music you play --

Coley Dennis: Besides (the Mercury Program), there are few instrumental bands that I really listen to. I'm sure they would probably agree that being an instrumental band, you always get lumped in with other instrumental bands, no matter what they are, it all goes together --

Splendid: "You sound like Godspeed."

Coley Dennis: Yeah. With my playing, I've always listened for the hook, and I really love, like, Kevin Shields and like the Edge and stuff and the way they approach the hook.

Splendid: And I hear you guys doing a lot of the My Bloody Valentine-type stuff live, but on the album I guess the distortion doesn't get that heavy or the feedback that aggressive. Is that something you're maybe a bit timid about?

Coley Dennis: No, I think we've definitely tried to do it in the studio before, but it's so hard to make that come across. I think we're one of those bands that definitely feeds on crowd reaction.

Sander Travisano: I think your intensity changes at times... I noticed it with Tristan the other night --

Coley Dennis: And we're excited about him too. We loved the way Matt played, but Matt was more of a safe guitar player than he is. Tristan plays a lot more like I do, like he's a Brit-pop kid, really into The Verve and stuff like that, and he's not afraid to let it go. I think it transfers live a little better.

Splendid: So things are working out pretty good with Matt gone?

Coley Dennis: Yeah, it's been really good. We've only done like a week of tour with him, but he's rad. We've done tours with his old band and stuff, and we just became friends.

Sander Travisano: Are they still around?

Coley Dennis: No...

Splendid: What band was Tristan in?

Coley Dennis: Absinthe Blind.

Splendid: Really? And they're not together anymore? That's kinda sad. I liked them a lot, actually...

Coley Dennis: Yeah, their last record was really good.

Splendid: That's cool. So how did y'all meet him?

Coley Dennis: We had met one of those guys one time and were like, "oh, we should do shows at some point," and we ended up playing with them and we hit it off and had a good time with them, and we liked their band a lot. I just immediately loved his guitar playing... When it came time to decide when we go on tour who's going to play for Matt, and he was the first person we thought of, and Absinthe Blind went on hiatus or whatever and so it worked out. He was stoked to do it.

Splendid: Is he gonna relocate?

Coley Dennis: Umm, I'm not sure. He's still playing with those guys a little bit, and his girlfriend lives up there, so we're leaving it open.

Splendid: Okay, one question before we leave: What's been the most exciting thing in everybody's life in the last month? What's made you happy to get up in the morning?

Sander Travisano: Not wrapping sandwiches.

Tom Reno: I have a dog that makes me get up in the morning by biting me, so I don't have to have any motivation other than that.

Dave LaBleu: Not having to push pills every morning.

Tom Reno: He does this professionally!

Sander Travisano: Yeah, he works for Rush Limbaugh professionally. He's the new housekeeper.

Coley Dennis: Getting back on the road, ya know. Getting out and playing.