Midnight Movies look like a Calvin Klein perfume ad, like if Simon Cowell designed a special ultimate post-rock group for your dad so he can relate to you more.

They even have a singing drummer, Gena Olivier, a slender girl who sounds like Nico or Laetitia from Stereolab.

Their live shows are these hypnotic drone-zone spectacles that always flick the trip switch, way more than on their self-titled debut album, which is pretty good too. Also involved are these handsome session musicians called Jason Hammons, the electronics guy, and Larry Schemel, whose sister Patty is in Hole. FYI, Larry wrote the guitar parts for "Mono" and "Julian I'm A Little Bit Older Than You" on Courtney Love's doomed last album. Umm, is this making them sound good or bad?

VICE: Coming from L.A. with a name like Midnight Movies, you must be bored to tears talking about the "cinematic" quality of your music, right?
Gena: We kept being asked that in Europe, especially in France. At the start we wanted to call ourselves More, but they were a band from the 70s, and MOR just looks wrong.

Why is L.A. still such a total piece of shit?
You'll have some rich famous person all decked out eating in some really fancy restaurant and right outside you've got people begging for crack money.

The PR said make sure you take a picture of the whole band because the guys get jealous. (She even thought with the spitting out the milk thing we were trying to make it look like Gena had cum running down her face. WTF?)
Er, well, it's hard with photographers. They say, "let's do some where the whole band's equal but just in case, we'll do a couple with Gena up front, just in case. And they're the ones that get used. The guys are cool with it but it's frustrating for all of us.

Yeah, well, sorry about the photo we used but it looks better than the press shots with the guys. They look like a Gap advert.

KEITH WARREN
Midnight Movies is out this month on Rykodisc.