Iration will add reggae groove to KFMA Fall Ball

Iration frontman Micah Pueschel just might be one of Rivers Cuomo’s biggest fans.

And if he meets the Weezer lead singer at KFMA Fall Ball on Sunday, Oct. 16, expect to see Pueschel go into full fanboy mode.

“He’s like one of my five or 10 favorite songwriters of all time,” Pueschel said last week from home in Santa Barbara, California. “That’s definitely fanboy territory.”

On paper, Pueschel’s reggae-rock band is a far cry from Weezer and fellow headliner Panic at the Disco. But over the past decade, the band, born in college bars while Pueschel and the original members were tooling about their undergraduate years, has put a pop-friendly spin on the genre. The band’s original members all hailed from Hawaii; the current lineup includes Pueschel, Adam Taylor, Joseph Dickens, Cayson Peterson and Micah Brown.

Here’s what Pueschel had to say about Iration’s new acoustic album and what we can expect on Sunday.

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Stripping it down: “We had a bunch of songs on our records that we kind of felt that the acoustic versions are really good and that maybe the recorded versions didn’t really reveal the way that the song was originally pictured. … For the most part, our fans love acoustic. The plan with the acoustic is to do a guerrilla-style marketing (when it comes out at year’s end). The whole point of it was to keep things very simple. It’s not going to go through this massive six-month marketing thing. We just wanted to do it kind of simple and for the most part just get it out there and not push it for monetary reasons. We want to give it to the fans.”

From bar band to big stage: “When we started, we didn’t even know how to play instruments. The goal was just to have fun. ... (But) we realized we were unique. When we released our EP with ‘Falling’ and ‘Wait and See,’ we realized we were on to something. There was nobody out there incorporating reggae the way that we were. We just went 100 percent for it and that just pulled us through it, and we were lucky enough to write some pretty good songs.”

A calm in Sunday’s rock storm: “We’ve been lucky that our music, the way that we do it, there’s enough crossover appeal that we’ve been pretty successful on alternative rock radio. Our songs are pretty straightforward with a reggae and kind of a pop sensibility. We have a number of songs that have been on the radio that are a little edgier. We’ve done a few of these kind of rock radio shows. We just did one in Philadelphia and San Diego. We are lucky that we can kinda cross and we’re not pigeonholed as just a straight reggae band. The creative styles that we bring into our sound. We are not afraid to go harder with the guitars and edgier with the drum sounds. Not every song is a straight, downbeat reggae tune in the fashion of Bob Marley. We’re not afraid to use synthesizers in a different way and use different sounds, everything from violin to ukulele to trumpets to synthesizers and weird things we find in the studio. We’re not afraid to push the boundaries.”

Adding the groove to KFMA Fall Ball: “We are going to obviously be kind of an outlier. We always are at rock shows. But we’re going to bring a groove, a good energy and positive feel. Our show is not in any way a big political or heavy-hearted kind of thing. It’s just kind of enjoy yourself, dance, and at the end you feel like you go your money’s worth.”