It was a boring winter when front man Drew Hermiller enlisted his brother Chad and their friend Scott to form the trio G-Whiz. It’s not that they couldn’t find anything better to do; it’s just that they had this compulsive need to make music. But their nerdcore dreams were interrupted by a cease-and-desist order from a band by the same name on the West Coast, an identity crisis that ultimately lead to the formation of Team Genius. “After G-Whiz, I wanted to write more in-depth songs,” says Drew. “I wanted to make a sound that was bigger and more epic.” So the Team started taking on stray players: a fiddle here, a keyboardist there, and all of a sudden a full-on experience started happening on stage. Chad, the elder Hermiller, and Chris Hudik team up on bass, occasionally rotating in bells or a glockenspiel for kicks, while Scott Dyer maintains his position as a 150lb shirtless wonder on the drums. Adding a much needed feminine element to this boy’s club, Erin Griffith and Emma Firth both joined in 2007, contributing their skills in keys and vocals respectively. For his part, Hermiller handles the lead guitar, vocals, keys, and harmonica melody here and there- but- he insists, “it’s impossible to assign specific roles to any of us, because the next week someone will have taught themselves to play ukulele, and then we’ll incorporate that into a song. It’s always changing.” Their vibe has been compared to Animal Collective and Arcade Fire; that high-octane burst that comes from having a bunch of people on stage rocking out with their own brand of geeky bravado. But there’s something distinctly retro about their sound, and the way it makes you nostalgic for awkward middle school birthday parties. Their poppy, earnest resonance smacks of the Ohio heartland, but their sometimes stark lyrics juxtaposed with infectious beats leaves the crowd dancing along to lines like “i'll bleed a little and you bleed a little/ lets all bleed together/ i'm so beautiful and you're so beautiful/ lets all sleep together,” realizing a few beats later the intensity of the words. Team Genius is their own anti-scene. They are the nail-biting, hand-standing kids you sat next to in Algebra class, only now they’re doing pop culture battle with idiot-proof lyrics and an ear full of sound.