The Odd Couple

“I’m so against robots. I
fucking hate them.”

During a more or less
normal conversation with Fergus & Geronimo, the Brooklyn band made up of
Jason Kelly and Andrew Savage in a bedroom in their shared apartment, the topic
unexpectedly turns to robots. Widespread, Internet-enabled geekery has made
robots something of an everyday topic; Googling “robots vs.” gets you 10
million results. But this is different. Savage begins a 10-minute harangue
about the takeover of our society by robots, how human beings are turning into
robots, why he hates Avatar and
how video games are “breaking into your mind,” all by way of explaining why
he’s quit Facebook, ditched his iPhone and begun replacing his digital clocks
with analog ones. When I point out his fancy, tiny, wireless Apple keyboard, he
tells me, “I don’t have anything against that keyboard. Yet.”

All the while, Savage is
sitting rail straight on the edge of the bed, with Kelly lazily sprawled behind
him. At the culmination of this speech, Kelly simply says, “I dunno, man.” And
that’s it. They don’t fight about it, they just agree to disagree and go about
their business.

This gets at the core of
Fergus & Geronimo, which released its latest album, Unlearn, last month: difference, independence and
respecting each other’s oddities. While they perform and record together,
Savage and Kelly actually write everything completely separately. “‘Fergus
& Geronimo,’ it’s just a name for two artists who are doing something. Not
necessarily a band,” Savage explains. “We’re putting out these songs, we’re
putting them on the same hard format, and there’s got to be a name for it. We
didn’t want to just call it ‘Andrew and Jason Writing Songs,’ but that’s pretty
much what it is.” They trust each other, and have the sort of mutual respect
that most married people can only dream of. “If he has an idea,” Savage says,
“that’s his song and he can finish it, and I expect the same courtesy.”

Everything about how the
two approach the recording process is different. Ask Kelly what the concept is,
and he shrugs and says, “To have fun?” Ask Savage, and he has a discursive take
on the history of Frank Zappa, the nature of receiving information from pop
culture, and being an independent artist. Kelly records his songs as rounds of
increasingly more polished demos; Savage hashes his ideas out largely impromptu
in the studio until he’s done.

It shows in the finished
product. Kelly’s songs on Unlearn,
like “Baby Don’t You Cry” and “World Never Stops,” are the record’s barn
burners: upbeat, bouncy, backed with “la la las” and largely about cute girls
he knows and cute girls he’d like to know. They’re irresistibly fun. Savage’s
are much darker and dense. Tracks like “Wanna Know What I Would Do if I Was
You?” and “Where The Walls Are Made Of Grass” cover slightly unusual pop topics
like the tension between primordialism and modernity or dismissive contempt for
what a lazy writer might call hipsters. Musically, the mood carefully matches
the subject matter, with the tribal drums of “Grass” mirroring the narrator’s
longing for a more natural life: “Shitting in the woods/ My face covered in
mud.” “Forced Aloha” is another Savage masterpiece, a sun-baked song about a
beach house that recalls Stephen Malkmus’ solo work.

While the guys’ songs are
different and uniquely satisfying, they still work together. Explaining the
band’s debt to Frank Zappa and Mothers of Invention, Savage outlines the
similarities in their approach: “People like [Zappa], Captain Beefheart and
Butthole Surfers could do multiple styles but still have one identity and
concept behind them.” He continues, casually reaching into a shelf of dozens of
records and plucking out each album as he references it. “You put on an album
like Burnt Weenie Sandwich,
which is just like all weirdo instrumentals, or Weasels Ripped my Flesh, which is weird muzak shit, or We’re Only in it
for the Money, which is a great
rock record. They all sound different, but they’re all coming from one brain,
from one idea.”

Not that any of this will
be obvious if you were to catch the live show. As Savage says, “We’re still
learning how to approach this as a live band… We have this record that has
all these weird parts, and all this instrumentation that would be really hard
to do.”

Kelly agrees. “It’s
impossible to play everything on the record with just four people, so we’re
just resorting to what we know best, which is just playing fast as fuck. We
just like to have a good time. I mean, you do all this work, loading your
equipment up and down stairs and shit, you might as well make the best of it.”

Fergus & Geronimo, Feb. 23, Monster Island
Basement, 128 River St. (at Metropolitan Ave.), Brooklyn, no phone; 8,
$TBA.