I know that I've talked about this before, but it honestly bears repeating until all of the mopes in the world get their stuff together: music, at its purest and most transportive, is about fun. Fun! Now, this is not to say that this energy can't be used to access less positive emotions like anger or sorrow, but I'll never get more out of music than I do when those chills come dancing up my spine when a purely joyful rock song hits my ear holes.

If Santa Cruz's The Wild Ones could be distilled down to any one descriptor, well, they're really fun. Of course, I may be biased, because this is a group of lovely ladies that make the kind of music that knocks the stuffing out of the pleasure center in my brain: combining the sort of exuberant sounds of girl groups like the Shangri-Las and the Shirelles with the goofy three-chord ruckus of the Ramones. It's the Go-Go's, it's X, it's Cyndi Lauper, it's the Lemonheads, it's a two-liter of Coca-Cola and a bag of Sour Patch Kids. It's sexy, silly, anti-moping music.

"Me and Belle Potter, our guitar player, had talked about starting a girl band for a really long time," says guitarist and vocalist Rachael Chavez. "And then, one night, we were just drinking at one of our friends' shows, and we decided to actually do it. We got our friend Hilary Weisert to play bass for us. ... We never really talked about (what The Wild Ones would be). Belle had some songs written, we wrote some songs together, and then I started writing songs, and it just happened."

This story of spontaneously forming a band speaks to the giddiness on display with The Wild Ones, I think. There's a free spirit roaming around with this band, one that has no qualms about trying out something offbeat or weird. And yet, The Wild Ones have such a solid vision of the type of band they are, and the songs are so cohesive and on message.

Let's take, for example, a one-two punch of songs on their LP, Dream On: "He's a Good Man," followed by "He's a Bad Man," the titles of which just about sum up half of the subject matter of popular music. "He's a Good Man" finds the narrator shyly pining away for the love of a stranger, while "He's a Bad Man" finds her more proactive, using her feminine wiles to trick a boy into taking her for a drive so she can steal his car and ditch him at the edge of town. They're two deft, yet reverent, takes on the tropes of ‘60s girl group music.

"We honestly haven't heard [those comparisons] too much, says Chavez. "But, it's always nice to have your band even mentioned in the same breath as awesome bands that we look up to and listen to all the time."

I hope she means it, because I've been doing a whole lot of willy-nilly comparison-making for the past few paragraphs. But I think those comparisons are apt, and I think The Wild Ones are deserving of those associations. But this isn't a band that skates by on nostalgia - their surf guitar flourishes and garage band energy lifts them up out of the threat of imitation, and their unabashed joy in playing music erases any fear of perceived cynicism.

What's left is a band that celebrates the fun in music - every tipsy dance party, every spontaneous sing-along, every memorable event in life punctuated by the song that's on the radio. Ironically, because it's so endearingly frivolous, The Wild Ones make music that actually matters.

NORTHERN, w/ Spider and the Webs, Bummer City, Aug. 2, 8 p.m., Cover TBA, 414 1/2 Legion Way, Olympia