On Midnight Juggernauts

I am not educating myself.

When I bought Ladytron's "Witching Hour," I ended up educating myself about everything I could find about Ladytron. OK, to be fair, perhaps I was concentrating on Helen Marnie, but it still counts as interest in the band, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, I've been listening to Midnight Juggernauts endlessly. If you look at my last.fm scrobbling, you'd think that I'm listening to Midnight Juggernauts a good deal. However, last.fm doesn't record what I hear in my car, and if I'm not listening to Bill Handel or Petros & Money, chances are that I'm listening to Midnight Juggernauts. And I commute over two hours a day; that's a lot of Midnight Juggernauts.

So I figured I'd better find out about them, starting at their website. But it turns out that the biography focuses more on the Dystopia album than on the individual members:

Upon entering the studio to begin their Dystopia journey Vincent and Andy - the band’s original nucleus - made the decision to invite a third member into the fold. Daniel Stricker (drums/vox) accepted the challenge, and the band's live show has reaped the rewards. Now an even more dynamic and energetic experience.

The AMG biography, as reproduced at Starpulse, has more - or less - information.

Midnight Juggernauts are an electro-pop synth rock group from Melbourne, Australia. The founding members, in a nod to the Ramones, renamed themselves Vincent Juggernaut and Andy Juggernaut. The two met in high school and played straightforward guitar rock together before moving on to experiment with synthesizers and dance music.

Vincent was quoted in a May, 2008 interview in The New Gay:

We like being this weird mysterious creation out there, people don't know if were married or siblings. It made things more interesting. We like playing around with the band's image. There's a lot of strange mysteries about this band, like we don't even know what Midnight Juggernauts means. I probably shouldn't admit that.

But Vincent did talk about music:

[W]e all have some pretty diverse tastes. Like I've always been into stuff from the seventies and eighties, anything from Gorgio [Morodor] to Blondie to The B-52s, to Van Halen, to lots of other cheese which I probably shouldn't admit to. Andy the guitarist, he's really into old school metal like Slayer, and Daniel is into stuff like The Pixies....

I guess we like being able to play and experiment with the music we like. We love pop music as well, we love pop hooks and melody, but the widest scope you can play with is that prog land, it's fun being able to go off on different tangents here and there. Who knows? The next album could be some really self-indulgent orchestral prog-rock masterpiece.

As for the current album:

We liked the idea of having an album which had this dark mood to it, and the title was a dark feeling which we thought suited the album. Even though it has pop elements and it's optimistic, we like playing with light and shade throughout. So it's like these pop songs, but there's this darkness and melancholy progression which we like playing with.

See the entire interview here.