The Rapture's mix of relentless rhythms, jagged guitars, and pitched vocals gets twisted smartly in W.A.S. works. Instead of the DFA's true house beats, we get drums that are just wilder and more bloodthirsty than rock--an apt way to consider the whole mad science of the thing.
We Are Scientists, a.k.a. “the We Are Scientists”, a.k.a. “W.A.S”., sometimes written “tW.A.S.”, comprises Keith Murray, guitar and lead vocals; Chris Cain, bass guitar and backing vocals; Michael Tapper, drums and backing vocals. Generating rock music of the thoughtful, sometimes epic, often loud, vaguely danceable, implicitly humanist variety, there are a couple of things that characterize our sound right now, and we’re prepared to reveal them. First there are melodies, some of them catchy. They can be found in the vocal lines and often, yes, god help us, the guitar lines. Second, and lastly, we try to have each instrument do something distinct from what the other instruments are doing as often as possible. So for example the bass doesn’t just play the root notes of what the guitar is playing, and it doesn’t necessarily hit when the bass drum is hitting. We call this approach, which we didn’t invent, and which many people do much better than we do, Advanced High Level Sectional Articulation. In fact, we don’t call it that; we don’t really refer to it by a special name, we just do it. We did invent that name, though — ‘Advanced High Level Sectional Articulation’.