| Chester French "We were trying to make the album an album," Drummey says. "What we tried to do is make something musically diverse but also unified. And we did the best job of that ever in the history of music." Don't just take it from him. The band has already been lauded by the press with features such as Spin's Who's Next '08 and Rolling Stone's Artists To Watch. And take it from no less than Pharrell Williams, who signed the unclassifiable duo to his Star Trak/Interscope label after an early copy of the album, recorded by the two largely in a dorm basement studio while they were students at Harvard, was passed from them to his engineer, Drew Coleman. "It's been a long time since I've heard a project teeming with this sort of musicality and originality," says Williams, the phenomenal artist/producer/trailblazer of Neptunes, N.E.R.D. and so-much-else fame. "You're going to watch history unfold with these guys. I feel it in my gut." That works for Wallach and Drummey, who trace an aesthetic lineage from Beethoven to Brian Wilson, from Les Paul to Prince to, well, Pharrell Williams. They see walls coming down with a new generation inspired by innovative artists like Gnarls Barkley and OutKast. Chester French -- subject of a signing battle that also included Kanye West, Jermaine Dupri and Jimmy Iovine before Williams closed the deal -- wants to be at the front of that movement. "Hopefully our role in culture can be to stand for this moment in history where meaningless social and musical categories are finally dissolving," Wallach says. The music backs that up. In discussion the two freely reference a sky-full of musical stars and constellations. "A lot of people make experimental music. We look at our music as not being experimental, but being the result of a variety of experiments -- what we distilled from doing outlandish things, what are the best ideas," Drummey says. It's a concept that coalesced over the course of the three-plus years in which the music was initially made, a process that began with a simple encounter of the two then-freshmen at a Harvard commissary.
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