Ready ... Set... OK Go Masters the Ceremony

Their posters decorate mailboxes, dumpsters, and building facades all over Chicago. Their gigs include opening for the likes of Elliot Smith, Promise Ring, Versus and Sloan. Cityslickers OK Go are a rock 'n' roll band with a plan, building name-recognition via self-promotion and creating a faceless kind of fame that begs the question: Who the hell are these guys?

"[Our] goal was to get as many people to know our name as possible," admits frontman Damian Kulash, 24. "Aside from personal friends, the only initial audience a new band can find is among the curious, so we wanted to make sure that people were as curious as we could get them."

Assembled in the fall of 1998, OK Go consists of singer Kulash, guitarist/keyboardist Andrew Duncan, bassist Tim Nordwind and drummer Dan Konopka. Their music, an energetic brew of '60s jouncy styles and modern pop wiles, is a dab too glib and a touch too saccharine for my taste. Still these guys are good. Their presence is enchanting, their tunes are catchy and their enthusiasm is infectious. Hearing them live is like indulging in some sort of guilty pleasure: I couldn't help but smile after hearing their first song, thinking to myself, good times are here to come.

Set against the backdrop of a calculating hipness and dry nerdiness that makes the Chicago music scene, OK Go stands out among the masses by being audaciously fun. They jump around on stage, react to audience banter and turn the stage into a living theater. "Music trends always seem to get defined by what they are a reaction against," Kulash says. "I suppose in those terms, Chicago is ripe for a pendulum swing back away from the cold intellectualism of that last wave.

"At the risk of sounding ridiculously cliché, we're playing the music that we like, and that we best understand [though] it doesn't happen to align particularly easily with the niche that Chicago has carved out," Kulash continues. He uses words like "obtuse" "super-heady," and "opaque" to describe the Windy City's current underground sound. "In comparison, we're a good deal more shameless and less self-consciously 'intelligent' than most things going on." Their sharp contrast in character has brought them -- if not success -- instant recognition.

While their sound may be fun and games, OK Go's vision is hardly child's play. On the contrary, these boys are smart businessmen under the guise of the rock 'n' roll regalia. They truly believe in their product -- rock 'n' roll -- and they know how to use it to manufacture a good time. Pleasure is their business and they work hard at pleasing the crowd.

"There is a school of musicians who believe -- a few justifiably, and most not -- that their talent is so radiant that all they need to do is get up there and the glow will emanate," says Kulash. "We feel pretty certain we are not in that group, so we work a lot to put together a show that we think we would enjoy if we were in the audience."

OK Go is currently in the studio working with producer Dave Trumfio (Cibbo Matto, Wilco, The Mekons). Their debut album, tentatively entitled Typically Nasty Weather, is scheduled for release this winter.

For more information on OK Go, go to http://www.okgo.net.

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