Here's the whole story: Wednesday night we went to Neumo's to hear We Are Scientists (WAS). There.

That's not a good story? Ah, okay, okay, we'll...we'll punch it up. More first act? We Are Scientists are not scientists (Ha! Misdirection!) but are two guys called Keith Murray (guitar, lead vocals) and Chris Cain (bass guitar, backing vocals), and then there's two other guys, a drummer and a keyboard fellow.

(We're tempted to go on and on about the drummer, who was really smoking the skins there at Neumo's, but the WAS site refers to him as "a drummer" and the other guy as "a fourth man" so maybe the spotlight should remain trained on Keith and Chris.)

Chris turned out to be the "talkative" one of the two, and tried to convince the audience that he was excited to be in Seattle because it's a little-known fact that they filmed Coach (with Craig T. Nelson) here. It is little known because it is not a fact. But we appreciate his attempt at making a human connection, unless he is a Pathological Liar, in which case we still appreciate the Seattle shout-out. We're only human.

Keith jumped down into the audience and sang "Textbook" and walked around, surrounded by a halo of cameras, phones, and camera phones; he was like a self-ironizing Bono, except Bono is already self-ironizing, and he didn't mention debt relief. Also, the hair is different.

They played a bunch of songs from the new album, Brain Thrust Mastery, and of course many songs off With Love and Squalor (Salinger! Squee!) which was very big for them in the U.K. and that is funny because Esmé (of For Esmé, with Love and Squalor) is also English. Anyway, people say that Squalor was neo-Cure (which...what?), but the new one indie-rocks a bit harder. And that is a fact you can bank on at a live WAS show, thanks to "new drummer."

Some people were wearing '80s white, tapered-leg jeans, or poofy Molly Ringwald cast-offs, and it's true at one point we were almost persuaded that the Fixx and Oingo Boingo had taken the stage simultaneously, but we don't think there's any need to underscore that through costuming. It's just really, really fun music to Listen To and possibly even Dance To. Thank you. You can watch their "After Hours" video after the jump.