Music

Time Out has joined We Are Scientists frontpersons Keith Murray and Chris Cain at Olympia’s One Life Live exhibition. This self-improvement mecca houses a billion ways to improve yourself under one gargantuan roof, from career-change advice to volunteer recruitment to, as it turns out, a surprisingly well-stocked bar. It seems like a fitting location, given that WAS’ new album is named after their patented (at least, we hope it’s patented, for their own commercial safety) life-enhancing philosophy of Brain Thrust Mastery. This is a new theory of cognitive enhancement which mere words struggle to contain.

Feature continues

‘I would say if our discussion of it is halting,’ says singing guitarist Murray. ‘It’s not because we know very little about it, or because there’s not a lot of substance behind it. There’s a lot of powerful information there but it’s not delivered in chewable bits.’

I mean, we understand a lot about Brain Thrust Mastery,’ concurs Cain, ‘but we have yet to even begin to theorise its big bang. How did it begin? We don’t know. We just know that we’re in possession of it and we wanna share it.

Indeed, embarking on a short pre-release tour, the band wowed the crowds with Brain Thrust seminars before the show. Well, depending on your definition of ‘wowed’.

‘Our finding was roughly the first 65 percent of the show was confusion and bafflement,’ says Cain. ‘And that was followed by enjoyment and liking.’

Gillian McKeith, watch out - Brain Thrust Mastery helps people AND retired greyhounds

‘It’s a lot like the stages of mourning,’ explains Murray. ‘There’s denial, then anger, then acceptance, and then total subservience. And finally, eflourescence.’

The effects of Brain Thrust Mastery are a little difficult to explain, but the band assure us they are ‘immediate, long-term and comprehensive’.
‘It’s already helped you,’ states Murray with confidence.

‘We could rattle off a thousand names and their stories of how Brain Thrust Mastery has helped them,’ says Cain. ‘But what would be the point?’

Initially we had intended for the Thrust Masters to perform some guerilla self-help, improving the lives of passers-by before their very eyes.

Unfortunately, during our time there, helpees were outnumbered by helpers by approximately 1,000 to 1. Fighting through the perma-scrum of enablers proved impossible. Instead, we thought we’d scope out the competition.

VSO, Words Of Peace, the Retired Greyhounds Trust… all the big self-help guns are here, although guns aren’t really going to help you help yourself, unless you’re Patty Hearst or Kurt Cobain. There are also some lesser doyens of self-improvement, like… er, Amway. It’s almost as if the organisers couldn’t find enough genuine yoga dojos or whatever to fill the floor space, and panic-booked a load of travel agencies.

‘Is it disturbing to anyone else that so many of the self-help things around here concern going off the grid?’ muses Murray. ‘STA Travel advertises “vanishing”, then there’s another over here that just says “Escape”.’

‘Yeah,’ says Cain. ‘And there’s that one over there that says “Fuck Right Off” – “FRO Industries will pull you out of your day-to-day rut”.’

‘Does that actually say “Mad Academy” over there?’ Murray boggles. ‘“When you’ve simply got to go out of your mind!” I guess it’s a cheap method of getting away when you can’t afford to travel – go totally mad.’

It transpires this is actually a singing-and-dancing franchise for pre-schoolers, run by an adorable stuffed toy named Ralph. Feeling slightly guilty, we move on to the Kabbalah stand, where the super-helpful staff reassure us, quite firmly, that Kabbalah is not a religion. Rather it is a way of achieving spiritual blah blah something something. They also give us a goodie bag containing a cool fridge magnet and a guide to the mystic symbols of the Kabbalah code. No red string unfortunately, but if you need help sourcing red string, not even Lord Kabbal himself can save you. They also invite us to a Kabbalah empowerment lecture, which sounds like great fun, until we spot the bar. It being about 11.40 on a Sunday morning, it’s a relative oasis of calm (ironically enough). Here, we talk about something more sensible, namely the band’s Top Eleven hit album. While it shares a name with BTM, it’s a rather more nuanced work of art. Like the new works by Sebastien Tellier and Gonzalez, they’ve also incorporated the power of soft-rock into their groove, rather than relying on the thrill-a-second drillbit indie-punk of their debut, ‘With Love And Squalor’.

‘The only connection between the album and the lecture series is that it’s a fine example of what you can achieve through BTM,’ says Cain.
‘Yeah,’ says Murray, ‘it’s a result of Brain Thrust Mastery. Like, Brain Thrust Mastery – yeah, check this record out! Brain Thrust Mastery – watch me have sex later on! Brain Thrust Mastery – I’m gonna punch a bear, and it’ll take it! That bear will just suck it up, it’ll shake it off and just walk calmly away.’

‘He might not be grateful,’ says Cain, ‘but he will accept it. And that’s the power of Brain Thrust Mastery. The album exemplifies what can be done. And that’s not even when you try hard.’

‘Yeah,’ says Murray, ‘we phoned that one in.’

‘It was very natural that we grew out of that sound,’ muses Cain. ‘Also our personal feelings at the time of writing it was that if we heard another spiky, angular disco-punk dancefloor filler, we were gonna kill somebody.’

‘Brain Thrust Mastery’ is out now on Virgin. We Are Scientists play Shepherds Bush Empire on April 24 & 25.