Pay no attention to the flashing lights and the quests that defy plausibility and confuse human ability with fantasy. It’s the music that matters. When you’re saving a princess, listen for that swell of technological love current that has no shortage of ties to glee clubs, king dorks, analog programmers and Robert Moog. There’s no tone like a Casiotone fed through some filters and blown onto with the squeezed out air from helium balloons. It’s the club music for Short Circuit 2 groupies, the dweebs who would vote Johnny 5 for president with write-in nods. California’s The Advantage gives you that feeling of walking into one of those mall arcades back when the mall was worshipped and hearing a casserole of bleeps and bloops and gnarly electronic giggles signifying a death or a high school. Only what The Advantage does is it lets you walk into the arcade that would have been the indie arcade, stocked with the games that you never saw hanging around with the Mortal Kombat’s of the world. These forgotten games are where the band draws its inspiration. Drummer Spencer Seim, who plays guitar for noise rock gods Hella, said that he was never the kid who would get angry at the games whose music now makes up his side project’s oeuvre.

“I had one friend and I would go over to his house and watch him play one-player games against the machine,” Seim said. “He’d get so mad at the game and the controller that he’d just throwit across the room and say, ‘I don’t want those anymore.’ I’d ask, ‘Can I have them?’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, go ahead.’ They’d be like super-sweet games like Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. He was just outie on it. I think his family was pretty well-off so he could just get more games that he wanted. I would always get super-stoked on other kids getting angry at games because that meant that I would get them.”—Sean Moeller

Seim, all corralled with a lasso and by a good sheep dog, told Daytrotter what else the band that Nintendo’s together is loving this week.

1.—The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Washington, D.C.)
The Advantage spent much of Tuesday afternoon tooling around the location of the largest collection of historic air and spacecraft in the world.
“We were just in the rocket section with all of the solid and liquid-propelled stuff,” Seim said. “We’re really into that kind of stuff. We were laughing going by the space suits. They used to look like sci-fi worms. There were black and white pictures of people in these weird, wormy spacesuit things. We go to a lot of museums and places like this when we’re on the road and have time, but this is definitely one of the nerdiest ones.”

2.—Tapes and iPods
“We’ve got some Sabbath tapes that we’ve been listening to. They’re just always floating around in the van for use at a later time. We’ve been listening to Rush and some classical stuff that Carson (McWhirter) put on. I’m not really sure who the composers were. Make Believe, this great band from Chicago. Older King Crimson – getting our prog vibe on. We were listening to Mr. Bungle the other day. That’s always a favorite. And we’ve been trying to listen to one, maybe two Beatles records a day.”

3.—Local eateries “We’re not really a fast food-eating band. We have standards that we like going to when we’re in certain places. If we’re in Providence, we’ll have a meal at Julian’s. When we’re in New York, we’ll got to the old Jewish delis or this one Ukrainian place. When we were in Brooklyn, I took the guys to Mama’s, this crazy sould food place that’s really bumpin.’”

4.—Learning Japanese “I see the other guys reading things, but I forgot mine. The only thing I’m reading right now anyway is a Japanese-to-English manual. I know a bit of Spanish just from growing up and taking a few classes. I’d really like to learn Japanese, but I’m just reading my hands and the floor and what’s happening outside the van.”

The Advantage