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CUTE IS WHAT WE AIM FOR

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MUSIC INTERVIEW FUELED BY BUZZ

Cute Is What We Aim For Looks to Be the Fueled By Ramen Label’s Latest Success Story

ost bands two years in the making are lucky enough to be playing basements shows and VFW halls in their hometown. The guys in Cute Is What We Aim For have already played mid-sized clubs across the globe and they’re just one record into their career. Started out of the breakup of a local band, Cute Is What We Aim For formed in early 2005 in the not-so-rockin’ town of Buffalo, NY. Combining tongue-in-cheek lyrics with unbelievably hooky pop music, the band threw together some demos and started sending to their favorite labels. Florida-based Fueled By Ramen, who discovered bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic at the Disco!, saw potential, scoped up the band and put them on the emopop fast track. Guitarist Jeff Czum, in Atlanta to play a show at the Masquerade, talked to us recently about the start of the band, labelmates Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco, and leaving Buffalo. M BY JOHN B. MOORE

Have you guys been on the road since the album came out last June? Yup, pretty much ever since. We went out with some bands like Spitalfield, headlined a few shows, then went out with Jack’s Mannequin and all these others, so we’ve been pretty busy this year.

Have you had much time off? A few weeks here and there. After this tour we go to Europe then have like five weeks off until the Warped Tour, so it’s not too bad.

This is the first band you’ve been in where you’ve had to tour this exhaustively. Is it get ting old yet? No, it’s definitely still a cool experience. I get to travel all over the world, so I definitely don’t take it for granted.

How did the band first get started? Shaant (Hacikyan, singer) and I were in an other local band in Buffalo and he decided to quit. I decided to quit and we got together with some guys we knew from around the scene. We practiced together and wrote “Teasing to Please” as our first song and said, “Hey, we can do this.” So we’ve been together ever since.

When you first got together, did you have any intention of making a career out of this or was it just another band for fun? I thought we’d be just another local band, just playing around Buffalo. I never thought we’d make it out of that city. pretty good and started practicing more and more, getting more songs together and then we recorded few demos. We started sending them out to labels.

How important was the Internet in getting your band discovered? It was huge for us. We had to set up a MySpace page so people could hear us and that just started blowing up and we were like “Holy Shit.” We didn’t really forward links along, so it was all just word of mouth. That’s one thing I like about it.

How did you guys come to the attention of your label, Fueled By Ramen? That’s actually the only label who wanted us. So it worked out because it was our favorite label, so we were definitely up for it. They called us and we were in traffic on our first tour in Washington D.C. and John Janic (label head) called and said, “Hey, I want to meet you guys.” We had a show in Florida, so we meet with them and signed a couple of months later.

It’s a great label to be on right now, between Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco and The Academy Is… Is there a lot of competition between the other bands on the label? Not at all, it’s much more of a family vibe. We all get along, so there’s not a lot of compe tition.

You had mentioned that you guys are getting ready to tour Europe. Is that you first time going there as a band? In Germany and France, yeah, but we’ve been to the UK a couple of times. But I am definitely excited to go and play Germany and Amster dam and all those places.

What was it like to play in the UK for the first time? It was really cool. All the kids are so cool. They are so appreciative of the music and so into it, so I love to play over there.

Have you started putting songs together yet for the new record? We’ve been doing some writing here and there. It’s just a matter of all of us sitting down And putting it all together. We’ll probably record next winter.

Are you nervous at all about following up this record, considering how well it has done? No. I want it to be a little different from our first album, because our influences have changed a lot.

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