Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino are the quintessential “cutesy” dance-pop duo. They smile broad, innocent smiles when on stage. They swap knowing looks when pounding out their cooperatively written songs about things looking up and credos of “yeah yeah.” And they create music videos about homicidal dance parties reaching maximum dance fervor in an ecstasy of severed body parts.
Unstereotyped and uncategorized, Matt and Kim will bring this gore-tinged dance party to UCLA at 7 p.m. in the Cooperage, at a show presented by the Campus Events Commission.
Obviously their dually written songs and openly exposed dating life is something other than a shared opportunity for cuddly fan voyeurism. Instead, it’s an opportunity to clash with what is comfortably accepted as just upbeat or cute.
The aforementioned video for the song “5K” is an underground number shot with gallons of fake blood and starring only close friends of the band.
“5K” revolves around a story line of Johnson being hacked to pieces as his winning smile continues to shine through the gore. Meanwhile, keyboard riffs are played by arm stumps.
At one point in the video, audience members begin mimicking the bloodbath, insinuating the easily-influenced mind-set of, “That’s kind of cool. We’re seeing this band do it, now we’re going to do it,” as Johnson describes it.
Underneath the obvious emulation is a jab at the trendiness and mindless fad-following that the band is subtly satirizing in the video.
It seems that Johnson and Schifino have a right to discuss proper fan fellowship, as their saturated MySpace account holds proof of both the odd fact that most kids want to nuzzle them to death like baby kittens on a grandma sweater and yet are also willing to drive unheard-of distances and climb barbed wire to attend spur-of-the-moment shows.
“We tend to prefer not playing to sterile club situations. We like playing art spaces and warehouses and things like that,” Johnson said. “People just find us.”
Their fans were even treated to an exact address of the duo’s residence, with the cover art for their self-titled EP prominently displaying the New York-based music duo’s postal address, a candidly honest symbol of the duo’s heart-on-your-sleeve aesthetic.
After several “sexual solicitations from minors,” as Johnson called them, and other such nonsense (Johnson assures there was no anthrax), the fledgling independent band realized it was no longer just an innocuous blip on the music scene, but rather a hotly-desired commodity by big-name record labels and sociopathic fans alike.
Yet Johnson and Schifino were still wary of binding record contracts that could potentially limit their creativity.
“I’m still kind of freaked out by the idea of someone else owning our song that we wrote, owning our art,” Johnson said.
The idea of someone preventing you from expressing your own ideas by contract alone is unsettling to say the least, and one that Johnson finds problematic.
“It’s not like (the record labels) were sitting down at night with a notepad and writing that song,” Johnson said.
As much as can be maintained from a musically honest point of view, Matt and Kim might as well be some sort of George Washington-esque Siamese twins.
Despite a turn from the blood-drinking punk brashness of bands such as The Casualties to top-40 hip-hop, Johnson claims that both he and Schifino stay true to their earlier beliefs by keeping their melodies simple and compelling, or at least as much as a minimalist house beat can be mimicked by Schifino’s drum set or a cut-and-run punk riff can be pepped up by a keyboard equivalent.
Coming from musical backgrounds as divergent as Johnson’s politically charged punk childhood and Schifino’s stint in the straight-edge house music scene, in order to consolidate into a prospective MTV hit-churning pop monster, Johnson is honest about the concessions that he and Kim have had to make.
“I came to mainstream music when I stopped being narrow-minded,” Johnson said.