How Many Times Has Math the Band's Kevin Steinhauser Puked Onstage? More Than You'd Think.

Keena

Math the Band is scheduled to perform Monday, December 3, at Trunk Space.

Short-circuited spazz pop screamers Math the Band have been grinding out and streaking across the country for nearly a decade, spreading a tapestry of peaked soundboard levels and extreme sincerity.

Guitarist, singer, and composer Kevin Steinhauser teamed up with his girlfriend Justine Mainville in 2007 to solidify the current line-up, and he estimates the band is approaching over 900 live shows played. While acknowledging the grueling physical toll of near-constant touring, Steinhauser says the band is fueled by a positive feedback loop of high-tempo posi-punk songs feeding high-energy audiences who give the good feelings right back.

"Every night we see people who are all probably motivated and energetic people themselves," he says. "It all feeds into itself."

The band spent last summer recording their latest album, Get Real, at the mammoth non-profit art collective AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island, where the two are artists in residence. The album combines the arena-sized bear-hug riffage of party rocker Andrew WK (who brought Math on tour last year), the tweaked synth dorkery of Atom and His Package, and the absurd yet serious motivational verse of traveling YouTube "Internet poet" Steve Roggenbuck. The band proudly notes that not a single track on Get Real dips below 170 beats per minute.

Though the music is an over-caffeinated spree, Steinhauser is even-keeled and soft-spoken on the phone, thinking carefully about how to describe his process for writing lyrics that are as manically silly as they are universally motivational. "We don't have anything in the past four or five years that are narrative songs," he says. "I write the lyrics last, but I'll have the melody for the lyrics written and just fill it in like a Mad Lib."

He only makes a statement that merits exclamation when talking about writing "Tour de Friends" from their 2009 album Don't Worry, a frantic slideshow of memories he jotted down while on the road. "A motorcycle rode into a grocery store, I saw that happen in California," he laughs. "Nobody else saw it. They all thought I was lying! The lyrics to that song are just one jumbled thought after another."