Gym Class Heroes likes to keep audiences guessing

By John Benson

The band’s fans are open-minded musically, founding member Matt McGinley said.

Aside from parents and grandparents, Daryl Hall — one half of the pop rock duo Hall and Oates — for the most part isn’t really cool.

That is unless you’re a member of alternative hip-hop act Gym Class Heroes, which followed up its 2007 “The Daryl Hall For President Tour” with an actual guest appearance by the pop-soul singer on the group’s recently released studio effort “The Quilt.”

“It’s not always about what will be easily digestible for audiences,” Gym Class Heroes and founding member Matt McGinley, calling from Los Angeles, said with a laugh. “Sometimes it’s about testing your audience, and I guess pushing them to open up musically. We’ve always been lucky with the type of people who are attracted to Gym Class Heroes because they’ve kind of come to the table with a very open mind and a pretty diverse palate musically.

“So I think if I was a typical fan going to pick up a Gym Class Heroes class record, I think I’d be intrigued and anxious to hear us mixed with Daryl Hall.”

Though that’s assuming — and this is a big leap — that they know of the Hall and Oates catalog, the bigger story for Gym Class Heroes can be found in the group’s steadfast approach to its music. Take, for instance, the band’s previous studio effort, 2006’s “As Cruel as School Children,” which included its top five and highest-charting single to date, “Cupid’s Chokehold.” The track stood out for its use of a sample, the familiar hook from Supertramp’s classic rock hit “Breakfast in America.”

Considering the group enjoyed such success, perhaps it would revisit the notion of samples on “The Quilt.”

“I think with the success of ‘Cupid’s Chokehold,’ we didn’t necessarily want to be known as the band that samples songs from the ’70s and ’80s,” McGinley said. “So with ‘The Quilt,’ we did the album sample free and took the emphasis back to creating every bit of sound that’s on the record.”

This leads us to the notion that Gym Class Heroes is ostensibly a novelty band. Though such a label is often used to describe a group for being superficial, the reality is this upstate New York act’s uniqueness allows it to flourish in the margins.

Further proof is the fact Gym Class Heroes are too rap for alternative rock audiences and too pop rock-ish for die-hard hip-hop fans, which oddly enough allows the band to happily exist in all worlds. For evidence, look no further than the band’s opening slot on the current Lil Wayne tour, which comes to Cleveland on Sunday, at Quicken Loans Arena. How does this tour make any sense for the Gym Class Heroes?

“I think it really doesn’t,” McGinley said. “I think with this band it’s always a difficult thing to pair us up with other groups, but for some reason there’s been a lot of tours that we work well with. It only enhances the tour to add something like Gym Glass Heroes, which is just a little bit different.

“But I think that’s kind of the usual case for us on any tour, whether it be a predominantly rock tour like Warped or a Fall Out Boy tour, for instance, or the other side of that being a Lil Wayne tour or going out with The Roots. I think we’re always offering something that’s a little bit different to whatever crowd we’re playing in front of.”