Crystal Skulls aren't cool. Not in the way "it" bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Arctic Monkeys are cool. Nobody is calling them the saviors of rock or the most important band of the millennium.
"[If] you took everything you heard and tried to count on it, you'd be a pretty disappointed person," says Skulls frontman Christian Wargo. "[At] the end of the day it's a lot of sunshine being blown up your ass."
Trading trendiness for the classics, Crystal Skulls make music for us born-in-the-'70s geeks whose parents spun the Beatles and Steely Dan while everyone else was digging Talking Heads. The local quartet self-recorded last year's Blocked Numbers in a living room, emerging with 10 silky, piano-driven lounge-pop numbers that slyly snuck lyrics like "How you gonna pretend/With the way that you bend/You never give it to your boyfriend?" over breezy chords that would've made bitchin' '70s sitcom themes.
"I'm not an elitist when it comes to music. I like so much stuff that some people think is totally stupid, but I don't care," says the former Pedro the Lion guitarist, who counts Aaron Neville and Air Supply among his favorites. Lately, rather than keeping up with Pitchfork's buzz bands, Wargo has been listening to '60s and '70s artists like Shuggie Otis and Roy Ayers, "bands that have serious groove to them."
That influence surfaces on the new Outgoing Behavior, which continues in the same vein as its predecessor, but carries a slicker sound. "We wanted to make something that had a little bit more clarity," says Wargo. "I wanted to make a little more fun, less bitingly sarcastic record. Overall, it's music to my ears."
