Ray of spite

Beauty is where you find it, says Deathray frontman Dana Gumbiner. At least that's how he justifies risking his considerable cool-crowd credibility, which was bolstered immeasurably by forming a band that features two former members of hipster faves Cake, by publicly admitting he digs Britney Spears.

"I was watching this thing on MTV, Making the Video, and she is just so obviously manufactured, but she knows it and she doesn't seem to care," Gumbiner rationalizes. "She's so trite, but something about the basslines is just awesome. I like her music, and there's some cool hooks in there, but I can't tell if I like it in a tongue-in-cheek fashion or if it's a genuine, sincere love. I think it's a little bit of both."

This revelation comes as somewhat of a surprise after taking a listen to Deathray's self-titled debut. It's pop too, but it's the kind that has little in common with the prepackaged, overmarketed bubble gum all over the radio -- but plenty of similarities to The Cars' new-wave sensibilities and, of course, the work of every power-pop star's hero, Alex Chilton of Big Star.

"His songs almost sound as if they're about to fall apart at any moment, and the energy is so incredible," Gumbiner raves. "There's just the right amount of danger in those songs to make them really interesting to me."

It's difficult to isolate the ingredients that take pop to a higher plane, but Gumbiner hypothesizes about the mystery element that makes certain songs stick out more than others. "It's got to have a melody that affects you on some level emotionally, and for me, personally, I've got to be able to get the lyrics, so it's got to have some lyrical bent that keeps your attention," he explains. "It doesn't have to be anything particularly deep; it just has to be something affecting. I really love a lot of what's going on in R&B and hip-hop radio right now. There's some amazing lyrical hooks. They're not necessarily about anything but shagging, but it's also presented in a totally new and original light. I guess that's another element, too, that makes a great pop song. Even if you're Xeroxing something, even if you're wearing your influences on your sleeve, you've got to be able to make it your own and to present it in a way that is new and original and exciting. Not to say that we're anywhere close to that."

It was actually a shared appreciation of good pop that brought Gumbiner together with the men who would become Deathray. "I was doing a solo thing at the time, and I had a demo tape that I was kind of passing around. I was hanging out at a local open mic, and I knew Victor (Damiani, bass) and Greg (Brown, guitar) through Cake, because the band that I had played in previous to this (Little Guilt Shrine) had toured with them briefly," Gumbiner recalls. "I passed my tape along to Victor, who passed it along to Greg. Greg gave me a call, and the three of us met at a bar, had a beer, and talked about our influences. We discovered that we sort of had a shared musical vocabulary. We all loved '60s pop music and great pop songs in general, songwriters such as Alex Chilton and Nick Drake. We're big fans of the edgier late-'70s/early-'80s new-wave bands, like Blondie, Wire, and Television. Actually, I think Television might be a bad example because they write songs that last longer than three minutes."

Getting together proved simple enough, as did writing songs. It turned out that choosing a decent name was to be Deathray's biggest hurdle. "For a while we were known as Misty, and then we were The Plastic, and then I think we were The Micronauts for about two seconds," Gumbiner recalls. "I think Polygamy Okay was one name that lasted for about an hour, but eventually we settled on Deathray because it has the right amount of menace and it's sort of an indirect homage to our sci-fi jones." It so happened that Cake's label was still feeling kindly toward Brown -- who, it should be noted, penned the hit "The Distance" for his former band -- and Damiani. "Shortly after that, we made a five-song demo that we sent to Capricorn, and they were kind enough to offer us a record deal."

For that record, Deathray tapped Eric Valentine, best known for his work with Smash Mouth and Third Eye Blind, to sit behind the boards. "We sent him a tape through a friend of ours, Michael Urbano, and he said, 'Why don't you come on down to the studio and we can hang out, listen to some records and whatnot, and talk about what you guys want to do?'" Gumbiner recalls. "We drove down to Redwood Studio, which is just south of San Francisco, to hang out with him for the afternoon. We got there kind of expecting this black-lacquered, smooth enamel surface studio with a sexy receptionist or something behind a nice desk, and we get there and literally it's in this industrial warehouse space. It's basically a cross between our practice space, which is a complete dump, and an airport hangar, full of old vintage drum kits and an assortment of analog noisemakers, whether it be old Moogs or strange beatboxes from Japan that I've never seen anywhere else."