Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Fake Accents is their ability to make their inherent contradictions seamlessly coexist. One might not expect that the same band who records and listens to their own practice sessions would also write a disclaimer on their first album that most of the songs that they'd written were actually just ripped off of other songs. Their songs are identifiable by both their catchy hooks and their noisy guitar riffs. They will rip on and revere their musical heroes or peers over the course of the same sentence. They would just as soon laugh at themselves although their combined musical knowledge can put many music geeks to shame.

Although nothing brings these seemingly paradoxical parts of their group personality quite like their high-energy live show, they'll be heading into the studio next week to record the follow up album to 2006's The Big Disconnect. Three of the four Fake Accents sat down with us, confirming that these new tracks will still have echoes of The Fall and Pavement while expanding on their simultaneously discordant and indie-pop friendly tunes.

Visit The Fake Accents online at: myspace.com/thefakeaccents

See them next: December 5th at the Velvet Lounge with Pink Reason and Psychedelic Horseshit

Buy their album at: Crooked Beat, CDepot in College Park, The Rough Trade Shop in London

Questions for singer Zack Richardson, drummer Pete Smith and bassist David Johnston:

How did you guys all meet each other?

Zack: Dave [Malitz] Pete & I all met at WMUC at University of Maryland which is the radio station there. We all did that for a long time.
Pete: I’m a registered fill-in there still.
Zack: But the three of us met at WMUC and then we actually met Dave [Johnston] through…was it last.fm?
Dave: Very nerd-tastic. I was floating on the internet. I like the Fall, it’s on the top of my list. And [Dave Malitz] was like, "This is very funny! You like The Fall and your name is David! I like the Fall and my name is David, too!" Then I met these guys when Pete DJed at The Galaxy Hut. I went along and got quite quite drunk. Don’t remember what I said but you guys needed another bassist.
Pete: We were looking for a new bassist and Dave [Malitz] told this Dave [Johnston] that we were looking and Dave was like, "Oh I play bass," and then he went and learned all the bass parts to all the songs on our album. And we were like, "That’s flattering in the way that no one else in the world is ever going to do this." And the rest is history. Well, we had another bassist for three years.

Did that not end well?

Pete: It ended well. We just diverged.
Zack: It wasn’t anything high-drama.

One thing that you’ve already mentioned that becomes obvious listening to The Big Disconnect is that you guys really like The Fall and Pavement but I read on your myspace that you’re trying to pull in some other sounds?

Dave: More jangle-poppiness.
Pete: Sort of less jangle-poppiness. I think of this one as like a deathsled to hell. That’s the new stuff.
Zack: It’s poppier in parts and a lot noisier in other parts. And I guess we’re tighter but that lets us be looser if that doesn’t sound too much like something you’d hear in the judging in Iron Chef.
Pete: I think we’ve gotten more confident as a band and we’ve gotten more capable as far as playing and so we feel it’s easier to be noisier. We’ve always had this sort of sloppiness aesthetic but now we’re actually getting a little better at it.
Zack: We can sort of teeter on the edge of chaos more effectively because we can bring it back to coherency at the end of the song. We’ve always done that sort of live.

You guys unabashedly admit in your liner notes that you’re ripping off bands.

Pete: Truth be told, I wrote that without telling anybody else.
Zack: Truth be told, it's also true! We’ll usually start with at least a more defined idea of, "oh I would sort of like to write a song that sounds like this band or that band or something," and whereas before it often ended up sounding a whole lot like this band or that band that we were trying to lift from, now we have enough of kind of a band process in place where it ends up sounding more like us than it generally does like any of its sources.
Pete: I think that’s right. I feel good about – especially since we’ve been listening to our practices – it just sounds like us as much as anything else. I mean we have been – some of the new songs sound like Dinosaur Jr. and The Fall and Pavement and Unrest and Superchunk and Hawkwind.
Zack: It’s not ripping off any more than any of my other favorite bands rip off their favorite bands.
Pete: What do you do when you listen to music all day, when it comes time to play music you want to play the stuff that you’ve been listening to recently.

Would you guys say that you’re still not made for mass appeal.

Zack: It’s more that mass appeal isn’t our primary consideration. I’m not opposed to lots of people liking us and I don’t think that anyone in this band is. It is more that I want to be able to listen to our music and really really like it, and if that happens – that is what is most important and if other people like it too – that’s great and there’s no way that I’m gonna say that it doesn’t feel good if other people like it but I have to like it to.

What do you feel are the best and worst parts of the D.C. music scene?

Pete: The best part is that it’s not so huge and it’s not so pervasive so basically like – nobody’s watching you essentially and you can do whatever you want. And I know that here as opposed to New York if I like Royal Trux – I can feel pretty sure that I’m friends with a lot of the other people in town that like Royal Trux. In New York it’s a clusterfuck – everybody likes Royal Trux!
Zack: I think it’s fair to say that we don’t necessarily feel a lot of kinship.
Dave: There’s a lot of people trying to succeed.
Zack: There does seem to be a weird focus on making D.C. a – D.C.’s going to blow up – D.C.’s going to get big and I would be much more interested in D.C. turning out consistently interesting and worthwhile music.
Pete: I think nobody is interested in having an actual D.C. scene – with the exception of the Federal Reserve which has tried to become a scene – no one else is trying to make a scene, they’re just trying to play shows and sell records and since Dischord nobody has tried to do really anything. Like in the past 5 years? Just conservatively like – it’s just diffuse at this point and there are some good things that come from here but none of it is particularly linked into a concept of D.C. and I think we’re no exception. We don’t scream D.C. in any way.
Zack: I think the plus of having a town like this where you’ve got kind of a weird ruthless sort of amorphous community where you’ve got a lot of people who don’t have very much in common except that we’re all purveyors of semi-popular (and by "semi" I mean "not") popular music. A cool thing about that is for the most part you don’t do that sort of thing unless you’re really interested in it because practical success is just really not an option a lot of the time. So that’s a good and a bad thing but what I like about it is that you don’t have anyone to answer to.
Pete: We can be as under the radar as we want and then if we record something really awesome there are channels for us to get that to people who will hear it. It’s pretty non-judgmental in D.C. We are the most judgmental people in the D.C. music scene.
Zack: To summarize: when it comes down to it, we don’t really feel like we are necessarily a part of the D.C. music community and we’re okay with that.

Are there any venues that you particularly like?

David: We played the Black Cat and that was our high point. That was my favorite because we got free beer.
Zack: I really like the Black Cat. Backstage is cool. I’m much more familiar with Backstage and I like the Backstage a ton. Velvet is a really good place to see shows and to play shows. I really enjoy seeing shows at Hosiery and Bobby Fisher Memorial.
Pete: The only place I don’t like is DC9. I just don’t think the sound is good. I like playing at the Red & The Black. Our favorite actual place to play is the Galaxy Hut.
Zack: And it’s great to see shows there too. And I also like the Talking Head but that’s in Baltimore, not D.C.

Any final words of wisdom for DCist readers?
Zack: Wear a raincoat.