Get Set Go

"Bukowski said that his favorite work was his newest work," muses an excited Mike TV, vocalist/guitarist for the LA-based Get Set Go, "and that is how I feel about this album." If he sounds like a proud parent, that's because, in a sense, he is - he and his band have brought not only something new into the world, but an album to be proud of, the oxymoronically titled Sunshine, Joy and Happiness: A Tragic Tale of Death, Despair, and Other Silly Nonsense. Sunshine is an album that defies immediate categorization, yet is so full of hooks that its genre is utterly irrelevant. The record is a collection of whip smart pop songs coupled with moody, dark lyrics and song titles such as "Hell on Earth" and "Cannibalism is the Cure." It’s as if members of They Might Be Giants formed a band that sounded like the Violent Femmes meets Guided By Voices. One listen to the chorus of songs like "Please Destroy Me" is enough to win over pop fanatics. It impresses with inspired pop-hooks while simultaneously coming across as the theme song of a children's television show for Satanists – it's that thoroughly intriguing, and it is no wonder why the band's music has appeared on television shows such as Grey's Anatomy and Weeds. Not to be outdone by network television, Get Set Go have been busily working on their own take on reality TV – a series of shorts filmed on the band's most recent US tours and edited together to create a series of episodes about life in an indie band that will appear as a companion DVD to the album. "We wanted to show everyone all of the hard work that goes into doing what we do," explains Mike. Since their inception in the Highland Park area of Los Angeles, the band has been influential in the ever-expanding music scene there, the aptly dubbed "Launchpad scene," which has fostered such bands as Ozma, Go Betty Go, Bang Sugar Bang and countless others. The scene was founded on the idea of breaking down the barrier between performer and listener, with its epicenter being the über-hip venue Mr. T's. The man behind the booking at Mr T's? You guessed it – Mike TV. Get Set Go has taken the same approach that they and their peers fostered at Mr. T's and applied it to every aspect of the band, from allowing fans to book them for intimate house shows where the band can connect on a more direct level than otherwise possible in the typical club, to Mike's daily blog entries - the type of witty, sarcasm-filled rants that endear the writer to the reader by being just as inviting as they are biting. In fact, they are, in a sense, the written equivalent of a Get Set Go song. The approach certainly seems to be working. Says Mike: "We're going to keep on making records and winning people over one at a time. Along the way, we've been fortunate to be able to cobble together some pretty hardcore and strident fans through doing what we do." And it’s no wonder. With their newest opus under their belt, a personal approach to the band/fan relationship, exposure on critically acclaimed television shows and a work-ethic most bosses would kill for, it’s easy to see why Get Set Go are teeming with excitement.