"We've got Graham Norwood on guitars, Mike Acreman on keyboards, David Ostrem on bass, Louis Pavlosky on Kazoos and Oboes, and then there's me," Bryan Scary says when asked about his current band lineup. "We recently changed drummers - on the new EP whacks Sir Brian Bauer, but in concert smacks His Majesty Paul Amorese."

Scary, who handles the songwriting duties for Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears, says that other than the writing, the whole band is equally involved as far as arrangements, production, and "nose-picking." Delightful.

"This is not "Bryan Scary & The Faceless Four,"" Scary confirms, "because in the studio, we all work as a team. The first album was recorded by my lonesome only because I hadn't yet found these gentlemen - a glorified calling card, if you will."

Scary's first album Brooklyn-recorded album, The Shredding Tears (hence his band name), was released almost exactly three years ago, on October 31st 2006. Scary played all of the instruments on the set except for the drums, for which he called in Apollo Sunshine's Jeremy Black.  His newest - sorry, their newest set, Mad Valentines, will be released on October 27th, 2009 - just in time for Halloween weekend - and was recorded in Los Angeles with production by Jonathan Sadoff, with one track tagged on by Brooklyn producer Bryce Goggin.

"The studio sessions were fairly routine, save for occasional lapses into juvenilia," Scary says, "two days in, while wandering around L.A., bassist Davey Ostrem ran into a dessert establishment with the name "Stinky's Corndogs" crossed out on the sign and, hastily scribbled next to it in green magic marker, "Piebald's Pies" written in its stead. So he returned to the studio with a bag of multi-colored rainbow pies of various flavors, each one giving back the image of a sectional pie-chart denoting statistics known only to some lost cult of pastry chefs. The band then obviously erupted into the messiest and most iridescent pie fight ever."

That iridescence was limited to the pies, however, as Mad Valentines the album, in spite of its title, has little to do with the glitter-and-ribbons-embellished holiday itself.

"There's no real or metaphorical Valentine's Day theme to the record," Scary explains, "it's a collection of songs that couldn't be properly slotted into the more rigid conceptual confines of our previous full-length. It was conceived as a palate-cleanser of sorts. However, as they often do, each song ended up describing love, so the name just fell into place."

In addition to the ever-popular love theme, Scary says that a couple of outside albums helped further define Mad Valentines' sound. "While recording the EP, we drove around in a rental car with only two CDs, both playing on repeat: ABBA's The Arrival, and R. Wood's Super Active Wizzo," he explains, "I have to imagine they are the biggest influences on this particular record."

And don't even get him started on the state of today's pop music scene.

"'Pop' is definitely one of those terms that people tend to throw around aimlessly, sort of like 'Socialism,'" he says, "but everybody's got their own definition, their own sense of musical history, and their own green magic markers. In my mind, "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke" is the only true Pop song."