The Scholars are Jamie Messenger and Ben Burt; a duo from Melbourne consisting of keyboard, drums and vocals. But don’t let the mention of the word keyboard fool you. Jamie slams out power-chords and riffs on his keyboard like no one ever told him is wasn’t a guitar. This combined with Ben’s driving, inventive drumming and their highly melodic vocal lines goes toward explaining their unique and energetic uproar of a sound. Add to that a honky-tonk jaunt, a song in Japanese about the weather and a 90 second experimental track called Wa!! and you begin to get an idea of what this band is about. Imagine the Dresden Dolls covering a Ben Folds song, throw in some old punk-rock inspired riffs and season with the offbeat kitsch charm of Supertramp. Both Ben and Jamie are classically trained musicians (although they try to forget that as much as possible in the band). Lyrically The Scholars add their own twists to the usual themes of love, breakups and rejection as well as murdering the occasional monster under the bed with a Stanley knife. A note from The Scholars regarding the album title: The song ‘Can’t Stop The Scholars’ was initially recorded on our second EP, Nemesis. The title actually pays reference to the extended ending of the song, never recorded but often played at live shows. The song title actually has very little to do with the song itself which prompted Jamie’s younger brother Philip to point this out. His suggestion was to change the song title to something more fitting and appropriate and went on to recommend the name ‘Fade’, taken from a lyric in the song. Always ever helpful with his suggestions, he then advised that we should write another completely different song using the ‘Can’t Stop The Scholars’ idea because he thought, “it’s a really great idea for a song”. We quickly decided ‘Fade’ was a crap name for the song, so instead we wrote the track ‘My Brother Philip’ which is about him wanting us to write a new song as well as change the old song title.