Heavy assaults are being launched from PCs and laptops on fortified penthouse offices all over the globe. While MP3s chip away at the walls and the ProTools’ battering ram smashes down the door, CEOs cowering and quaking underneath polished walnut desks are about to realize the fight may be lost, because The Black Spoons and Craigslist just set off a fertilizer bomb in the underground parking garage and the foundation has been severely compromised.

“Six months after we formed, we had the album out. We actually booked gigs before the band existed,” says Tom Sean, lead singer and guitarist of The Black Spoons, about how Craigslist—an online community bulletin board—has helped his band. “After the band formed we played together three times, and then had that first gig. It was sort of zero-to-60 in no time at all, and that’s kinda the way we liked it.” To an independent band in New York, time can be as big an enemy as record execs.

I got a hold of Sean as he and his counterparts—drummer Ruben Mercado and bassist David Horton—were gassing up the van at a Texaco somewhere in Pennsylvania. The band is in the midst of an eight-city, Long List Craig! Tour to play songs from their debut album, My Dear Radium. The title of the album came to Sean during a trip to Paris while he was sitting in the Pantheon: “I think Rousseau is there, Voltaire, Pasteur. There is just a shitload people, and I’m just walking around… and I saw Marie Curie. She’s the first woman to be entombed there.”

Sean explains with the precision of a university professor, “The album title, My Dear Radium... It’s this thing that she phrased and made part of her life, and treated like a loved one that is slowly sapping away, a sort of love is radiation poisoning, that sort of motif or metaphor sort of started to get into my mind. It’s just one of those things. That when someone is exposed to radiation, there’s that moment when you feel absolutely fine, and then the doctor tells you that this is inside of you, and it’s just gonna get worse and worse. That’s sort of how the end of a love affair is sometimes.”

My Dear Radium has an equally infectious effect. It’s light and catchy as it first enters the ear, but then it lodges into the back of the brain and starts to have an affect on the listener’s cognitive ability. Horton’s bass pulses with the same vibrations that had early Bowie or Police coursing through the veins of the 70s and 80s. The sharp beats from Mercado’s drums hook into the back of the mind and keep the song in your head long enough for the depth of Sean’s voice and lyrics to sink in, and realize, as Sean says, that “a lot of that album comes out of the end of something in my life that was very big.”

Intelligent and independent, The Black Spoons are what Mission of Burma would have sounded like if they were from New York and focused more on poetry than politics. There is apparently a reason that New York bands have that gritty, crisp sound: “In New York creativity comes at $25 an hour,” says Sean. “You can hear it in bands like the Strokes and Interpol. It’s very tight and you know when the song is going to end.” Outside of the city, he says bands have a different “style of music that’s got eight minute compositions, and really textured stuff, multi-instrumentalist, and part of the reason why music sounds like that outside of New York is because it doesn’t cost any money to rehearse. You can do it in a garage or a basement, wherever, so you have all the time in the world.”

Wasting time in New York was not an option, so the band used Craigslist, which is basically a free, online classified site where people can buy or sell anything from used cars to used drum kits. It is an international website, used in almost every state and province in North America, but it was not originally intended for bands. “It’s funny, because if you click on the other cities, and you go to the musicians page there's like one, two, maybe three postings a day. In New York it’s like 200 postings a day, so it’s just a constant barrage of people looking for bands,” says Sean, who is quick to acknowledge the help the website has given his band.

“The short of it is that we wouldn’t exist without it… the entire infrastructure of the band is all through Craigslist. We found our recording studio there, our recording space, cinematographers, web designers, promotions people, right down to people to walk around the crowd and do mailing lists. The nuts and bolts that are necessary for a band, especially in New York.” Sean admits that without the website it probably would have taken five years to get to where the band currently is, and New York can do a lot of damage in that amount of time.

With just enough money for five days in the studio, the band made sure they had their sound and timing down before they got to the Seaside Lounge in Brooklyn. Once they got there, he says, “we made the decision that we were going to embrace limitations, and not attempt to add a bunch of instrumentation that didn’t reflect what we are when we play live.” Sean chuckles. “Don’t just have seven screaming guitar solos come out of the left channel when we only have one guitarist in the band who never solos.”

As pressed for time as they were, the recording process went quite smoothly, with two tracks getting layed down on the first night. “We were just kind of just playing around with it, why don’t we just try it and press record. We ended up, in just a few takes, nailing what we thought was really good. It might have been ‘Softest Leather’ or ‘Chemical Sue,’ I forget which one it was, but it was a great experience.” Sean has no regrets over their brief stint in the studio. “If we had $5000, $20,000 more and a month in the studio, this would be a different thing, but we really love it. This is where we are, this is the stage of the band and we said let’s go with this.”

The CD has a core following in cities like New York and Chicago, and is the true definition of college rock. My Dear Radium will be playing in fine-art-filled frat houses all over the country. The album will catch anyone’s ear, but will take at least a few years of English to understand the metaphors and imagery that Sean uses in his lyrics: he is currently seeking his Ph D in Chinese history, hoping to become the first indie rocker with tenure. “I was originally going to study Arabic, but then I somehow found my way into a Chinese history class. The teacher was a four-foot-tall ball of energy, and it was fucking awesome. I just loved it and stuck with it.”

A nerd at heart, Sean “always hated summer because it meant not being in school. The day before the first day of school, where all my friends were pissed off, I had my clothes all lined up on my bedroom floor, couldn’t sleep and ready to go. I don’t know what it is about it, but I’ve always liked it.”

The teaching instinct comes naturally to Sean, who is “looking forward to spawning some people, but in the meantime—all my band mates are making faces at each other as I tell you all this shit—but in the meantime, until I can do that, I would like to teach.” The real challenge, however, will be balancing his two loves: “I’ve always known that I wanted to end up in some sort of teaching profession. That path, that career is really conducive to music, because you have so much free time and you have summers off, and you have whole semesters off. It makes it possible for me to balance that equation, with academia on the one side and music on the other.”

The Black Spoons have taken a detour around the conventions of the record industry, and found a smooth shortcut with no dark figures lurking around the corner. Created by valedictorians of the D-I-Y movement of indie-rock’s graduating class, My Dear Radium is a beautifully written speech that will no doubt lead sophomore bands to their first CD.