THE NEW MOP TOPS: YOU DON’T HAVE TO HAVE A FLOPPY FRINGE TO BE IN A BAND IN BROOKLYN... BUT IT HELPS

Who are they?
The Depreciation Guild, a three-piece band from Brooklyn who mix dreamy, fuzzed-out guitar rock with dashes of lo-fi electronics. Actually, you could call them a four-piece, if you count their Famicom videogame system — Nintendo’s Japanese precursor to the dusty NES in your parents’ basement — as a member.

What, you mean they sit around playing Street Fighter II during drum solos?
Nope, the Famicom makes as much noise as they do. Originally a duo consisting of Kurt Feldman and Akira Hashizume, they started programming their own music using the Famicom, its beloved 8-bit soundcard (think of the warm tones, not to mention the blips and barks, of vintage games like Super Mario Brothers) and a special Japan-only game cartridge. Hashizume gave up the band for grad school, but before he did, the two completed their In Her Gentle Jaws album and started giving it away in early 2008 on the web. Now with brothers Christoph (guitar, vocals) and Anton Hochheim (drums) in tow, the band has just finished recording their second album, which is due in early 2010 on Kanine Records.

Kurt Feldman… that name sounds familiar….
Astute pop pickers will also recognize Feldman as the drummer for The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, whose distorted debut exploded in a haze of sunny melodies and critical acclaim earlier this year, and for whom Depreciation Guild have been opening on most of their live dates — though Feldman was already making a go of Depreciation Guild well before he joined the Pains.

“The first time [Depreciation Guild] toured with the Pains was the first time we ever toured as a band,” he explains by phone from Chicago, where he’s been mixing their new record with their producer Joshua Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv (who, incidentally, are playing the El Mocambo on Wednesday, September 9, two days after the Pains/Depreciation Guild Horseshoe show.) “Our album had already been out for over a year before we went on that tour, so basically at that point we had already had 60 or 70,000 downloads.”

Since they started touring, Christoph has also joined the Pains as a second guitarist. Feldman laughs off my suggestion that they offer Anton the job of lead tambourine, but surely his assimilation can’t be far behind.

What would Feldman be doing if the Pains hadn’t come along?
Probably what he had been doing — teaching at a music school, both private lessons as well as a program he likens to School of Rock. While most musicians yearn to quit their day jobs, Feldman confesses that leaving his was harder than it might seem.

“I definitely miss my students, because they’re all great kids. It kinda sucked, getting ripped away from [school], but I could potentially come back, eventually. I’m really good friends with all the people who work at the school, and, you know, they kind of understood [my leaving to tour]. They’re all musicians, too.”

So young but so cold
The spacey soundscapes on In Her Gentle Jaws (due out in a limited-edition vinyl/digital release on September 29) have been labelled as shoegaze, but while My Bloody Valentine’s influence is present and accounted for, the Guild’s music also draws on the ethereal 4AD catalogue (Pale Saints, Lush, et al.), while the Famicom beats seem to reference the obscure French post-punk movement dubbed coldwave. The resulting fusion is grand and romantic, sometimes with an undercurrent of despair; the bright melodies of “Darklooming” mask the yearning in the chorus, “I wish you didn’t need me so much, baby,” whereas the shimmering “Sky Ghosts” comes off like a sci-fi Wuthering Heights. Feldman describes the latter as “a made-up, cute story about two people who are in love, who died in the apocalypse and who are searching for each other in the clouds as ghosts.” Which, amazingly, is exactly how it sounds.

So which Final Fantasy title is the best, X or FFVII?
Ironically, considering how much storylines like the one in “Sky Ghosts” sound ripped from various Role Playing Games (RPGs), Feldman insists that he never played them.

“I’ve always been into really fast action games like Contra — lots of overstimulation, like, tonnes of bullets flying everywhere. My favourite game of all time is Galaga. I like really fast, low-attention-span games.”