Circuit Breakers

Plus, spending so much time on the road can be frustrating. They had gear stolen during a show in Seattle last fall — and two days later, their van died. To avoid canceling its whole fall tour, the band spent three weeks touring in Wasoba's dad's minivan. "When all that happened, it really brought out....how much supporters of us cared," Wasoba says. "I almost think that's a positive thing in a way — it really brought to the surface, 'Wow, these people really care about us.'"

These relationships proved especially valuable in late July, as the band was driving home from Portland, Oregon. Stovall was driving when one of the van's back tires exploded near Lincoln, Nebraska. "We were going 80 in a 75, totally with the flow of traffic, and at that speed Aaron had a hard time controlling the vehicle after the blow-out," Wasoba wrote on the band's recording blog (dynamosrecording.blogspot.com), which, until then, had been a lighthearted studio chronicle.

"We drove across the median towards oncoming traffic, and as soon as we hit the westbound part of the highway the van flipped over. We did a complete flip and luckily landed right back on our wheels and drove into the grass on the other side of the highway.... Our van is completely totaled." The band's gear and personal belongings survived intact. So did the band members themselves, save for some back pain Stovall and Kunstel experienced.

But a few days after arriving back in St. Louis, Wasoba grows uncharacteristically quiet when asked how he's feeling. "It's weird," he says. "There's so many different ways to think about it, that I'm just trying to not think about it. It hasn't totally sunk in, and I don't know if it will. It's just cheesy, 'We're lucky to be alive!' I feel so lame thinking it or saying it, but it's true, and I'm trying to kind of put it past, I guess."

It's the first Thursday in May, and the Dynamos have just driven fifteen hours straight from Austin, Texas, to play with the Humanoids, Target Market and the Bureau.

This Cicero's gig seems fueled by adrenaline from fatigue, with relief and joy at finally reaching home thrown in for good measure. Tempos are faster (think of a roller coaster out of control), stage banter is more sarcastic and the exuberant set feels like a train going off the rails. Accordingly, the crowd is dancing, rowdier, and much more into the set. "Their songs are very busy," Sean Nelson observes. "And you're never allowed to say the word 'funk' in indie rock, but there is a little bit of that. Their music is so rhythmic. It's more rhythmic than it is melodic. It's not like they're not verbal, 'cause their songs are super verbal. But they're more about the beat, which I think is really cool."

A completed demo of a new song from the July sessions with Walla supports his hypothesis. Much more danceable than past tunes, the song starts with stereo-surround keyboards that shoot like laser beams. Gradually, spacey synths begin to orbit around galloping drums and corrugated guitar barbs, until everything coalesces and whirls around itself like a flashing arcade game.

Lyrics for another new song Wasoba published on the studio blog are heartbreakingly moving: "Glaciers will melt but we'll be all right/We still have novels and songs to write/We'll go on living just like we do/We'll keep evolving if we have to."

"As we're working on stuff," Walla says, "every now and again somebody will sing a melody, or a couple of lines from one of the songs, and it's like, 'Oh my God, this is the shit you're just tossing off, that you're writing on the backs of napkins?'"

Ideally, says Walla, Barsuk — the label that nurtured Death Cab for Cutie for so many years before it signed with a major label — would want to sign So Many Dynamos. But he's not sure, and neither is the band, which seems almost bashful about having to sell itself — at the risk of coming across as insincere or disingenuous. "We've always tried to find the balance between wanting to succeed and wanting to 'make it,'" Wasoba says. "There's a difference. I'm personally afraid of coming off as we're trying to 'make it.' I'd never thought I'd say, 'Yeah, we're shopping a record around,'" he goes on, his voice slipping into a parody of an arrogant rock star. Kay chimes in: "It seems like a douche-y thing to do. It's schmooze-y."

"We have feet in doors," Wasoba says. "It's really weird. We've always been blissfully separated from [the industry side of things]. We've always been proud of how far away from that we are.

"But a label might want us. They might see it being worthwhile for them to put out our record. That's what's weird. We'd be dumb not to try it at this point."

This doesn't mean that the Dynamos are afraid of progress. "They're ambitious in the right way," says Nelson. "They're ambitious to improve and find out what their life in music might be like — rather than ambitious to get rich, or get even indie-famous. They just want to play."