Formed six years ago, the Mooney Suzuki has stirred up some noise in the neuvo garage rock scene with their over the top art rock shows and twang-driven rock tunes. The band’s two guitarists met in high school and soon formed the backbone of the band. According to drummer Augie Wilson, “They met through the old flier in the record store that the singer put out looking for people to get together and make music. We are all artists and art students, so it came off as a performance art study.”

The Mooney Suzuki consists of former students from Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union, and School of Visual Arts, which explains the group’s desire to design all their own shirts and fliers. “The entire approach to the band is an aesthetic approach,” says the drummer. “We are a performance piece—A living sculpture.”

Wilson says that the way the group performs on stage is as much a part of the music as the sound. Their live show speaks for itself. Guitarist Michael Bangs flails wildly at his guitar managing to land some notes as he backs into the crowd, dancing through the club. Singer Sammy James, Jr., cries out to the crowd, “We are rock n’ roll,” before crooning out tunes from the bands two releases. Wilson drums standing up, sitting down, or ditches the drums all together to lunge at the crowd with the bands signature plastic cobra in his arms. “The bands that we are drawn to perform well and did something beyond just putting out albums, whether it was The Make-Up or the MC5,” Wilson says.

Bangs interjects, “When we got together in 1996, there wasn’t much good music going on. It was a wasteland, which is why we decided to do this. Living in Manhattan, I wanted to see a show every night, and there was absolutely nothing.” The Mooney Suzuki was born out or pure frustration, and the need to get away from lackluster performances.

For Bangs, The Mooney Suzuki found him learning how to play guitar for the first time. To tame the 6-string creature, Bangs turned to his art influence. “It was an easy transition for me,” Bangs says. “It was just another form of expression. Whether it’s visual art or audio, it’s just a matter of taking all the things in your life, all of your influences, all the people that you worship and want to be like, and interpret it into a musical media instead of a visual one.”

The band’s latest effort “Electric Sweat” was recorded in three days, a far contrast from the bands first record that featured tunes that the band had been playing for years, and knew exactly what they wanted. “Electric Sweat was totally different, we just wrote songs really quickly, got into the studio and recorded,” Bangs says. “A lot of the songs we didn’t even know we were going to record until we got there. They just happened to turn out to our liking.”

Only months after “Electric Sweat” was released on Gammon Records, a small movement of garage rock bands began to swallow up radio time on rock stations and even spread to MTV. The White Stripes, The Hives and The Vines became media darlings with their own modernized version of stripped down Nugget rock. The Mooney Suzuki was swept up in the mix with positive comments from MTV and a tune in a Nike commercial.

“There’s a couple of ways to look at this new scene,” Bangs says. “The most obvious being the whole theory of the pendulum swinging back over the years, whether its from Poison to Nirvana, or Britney Spears to what we are doing now, It’s a matter of over saturation of crap to the point where a certain type of personality can’t handle it anymore, and goes back to stripping it down to the basics.”