Dead Poet Society

A perfect symbol for Dead Poet Society is the "shitty old seven-string" that guitarist Jack Collins bought at a mall back in high school.

"Our former bass player actually took a soldering iron and soldered the frets off," he recalls. "You couldn't play it normally at all. I thought it was going to be a great idea. Years later it was sitting in my closet, and I decided to pick it up again because I got really bored. It became the new way for us to write music — it opened up a door into this whole new world we discovered." 

"It was like, 'This is the guitar,' he adds. "It's like taking something broken and creating art out of it." 

With its wonky intonation, the instrument can't produce traditional chords or scales — an unlikely choice for a rock band with such strong commercial potential. Collins and frontman Jack Underkofler are a factory of hooky riffs, even at their most detuned and menacing; and the latter barks and coos with a crystalline purity that recalls Jeff Buckley and Muse's Matt Bellamy.