Lethal Enforcer

Calling this song "Hall-and-Oates-y glam," lead singer Keith Murray says it's his favorite from Brain Thrust Mastery. "It's essentially us trying to be David Bowie momentarily," explains Murray, who describes it as "just me thinking about why people – myself included – choose to stand behind certain aesthetic ideas that even to themselves are pretty vague and not produced within themselves. So it's just a question about how convicted people are about the ideas that in some cases they behave incredibly convinced about."

Ever the rebel, Keith tells about We Are Scientists' half-hearted attempt at becoming a one-band army railing against punk rockers while simultaneously harboring a loose envy for the bands those same people adored. "We had an idea later on for a sort of performance art band," confesses Keith, "whose entire meaning was going to be that we were going to get a show at 954 Gilman, which was the big punk club in Berkeley where Green Day and Rancid started, and which was right down the street from the house we lived in, and so we would drive by it all the time. And we were into punk and stuff, but we certainly weren't a strident part of any theme or political band movement. So we turned into a performance art thing where we wanted to insult the kids at the punk rock clubs on Gilman Street. It was going to be a multi-media extravaganza that would really destroy all their principles right before their eyes. But we never actually got a show there. (laughing) It was a misbegotten notion."

There have been quite a few stories circulating about how We Are Scientists acquired that name. One of the stories reports that when applying for a bank loan they needed to state an occupation. So they told the loan officer, "We are scientists." The real story, in founding member Keith Murray's words, is far less deceitful. Says Keith: "The use of the name now is antiquated at this point. I mean, the name itself came about when Chris and I and the original third member of We Are Scientists, who was the original singer and guitarist – his name was Scott – all moved from L.A. where we went to college, to San Francisco – and this was before we had the band. We were returning a U-Haul trailer and the guy who worked at U-Haul and was checking out the trailer sort of regarded us, and noted that we were all pretty clearly non-athletic bespectacled dudes – we all looked fairly similar – asked if we were brothers initially. And we told him we weren't. And he sort of reconsidered us, and then asked if we were all scientists. So that name stuck." (read the full interview with Keith Murray)