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Happy new year etc. I wasn’t planning on posting today, but I like the symmetry of today’s date and wanted to mark it somehow. I hope you and yours did or didn’t have a top New Year’s Eve, depending on how you do or don’t celebrate that happy event.

Now that’s out of the way, tell me what comes to your mind when you hear the band name Gayngs? First time I came across it I had nothing but images of bad hip hop rapster type business and just thought UGH! Somehow along the way though I was convinced to download a couple of sample songs and there is no way that I was expecting to hear anything at all like this:

By Your Side (Daytrotter Session) – Gayngs

And I liked it.

Then I read this bit in Wikipedia and this article in Paste Magazine and bearing in mind that this song and this interview is literally the only information that I have, tell me, is the band a pisstake or not? I don’t know.

Paste: How faithful did the album end up being to your original vision for it?
Coulter: What we planned at first was making a record that was soft-rock—that was the term we were throwing around the most. I think once the songs began to take form, though, people instinctually weren’t trying to stick to a script as much as they were just trying to play great parts, only maybe in a mindset where slap bass is OK, or where cheesier sounds are OK. We would go through this keyboard that Ryan had called a Triton, and we used these sounds that normally wouldn’t work, like a synth flute or a bad synth trumpet, but I think the way we mixed and edited them together, we were able to take some of these quintessentially cheesy sounds and put them in a context where they actually work. I think that’s half the fun, experimenting with all these sounds people tell you not to use, and trying to change their minds by putting them in a new context.

Paste: Has the response to the album been what you expected? Critics seem divided as to whether the album is intended to be taken seriously or as a joke.
Olson: It’s interesting that people have any opinion on it. It’s not a Weird Al album. It’s not a joke. If critics want to use the album to write a dissertation on hipster irony, though, they can go to town. It’s pointless for me to tell them any more plainly than the album itself what it’s about. It is interesting to see how people get fired up about it, though. I think some people are afraid that the album is an inside joke that they’re not in on. Like, if you like it, you’re being made fun of. That’s not the intention. There are definitely some quasi-guilty pleasures on the album, but we’re referencing them for a reason.

So are you just learning about them now, like I am? Do you think they’re good or bad or just a bit of a joke? I’m interested to hear what you reckon.

Need to hear more? Download the whole Daytrotter session here and you can also download a couple more free tracks at the website.

And I was going to use the cover art from their November release Relayted but I’m afraid it crept me out too much.