"Can ya do it like a machine? Better than a machine?" Perhaps we should ask the experts. Girls Against Boys, the four NYC-via-DC boys who make the above suggestion, could teach "Top Gear" a thing or two about the seductive allure of dangerous machines. Their tense, low-slung double bass attack and Scott McCloud's rough-edged vocal insinuations have always cruised a little over the speed limit. Even before they were trying to sound like machines.
So welcome to this year's model, and buckle up. "Freak*On*Ica", their perfectly-honed Geffen debut, leaves most "aggressive" rock and roll sputtering like Transit vans in the wake of its Viper-fast night cruise through the Big Apple, from a full-throttle "Park Avenue" to the "Do all styles/East coasting/West coasting" of "Cowboy's Orbit".
Apparently, it's all down to the influence of electronica. But we know better. After all, only Girls Against Boys could take the clanking of machines and make it blend in with their reputation for being sexy. So, boys, do the frequent mentions of your charismatic stage presence become tiresome?
"Well," Scott McCloud (vocals, guitars, devastating ability to weaken women's knees) replies, "it's still rock and roll music. Which isn't strictly just a musical form. You know, all that imaging. if you want to enter into this world, you have to resign yourself to it. You can't be driven crazy."
"I think we still enjoy playing it up," Eli Janney (bass, keyboards, vocals, noted indie producer) adds. "We don't take it that seriously. It's still sort of a game."
"You just have to be humorous about it," Scott continues. "I mean, when you pull into town and every paper says, 'Sex freaks pull into town'. it's hard not to think, 'Oh, great, the laughing stock of Pittsburgh. Now I have to go out there and be really sexy.'"
Good, Scott's mentioned the S-word first. For some reason, it tends to come up when discussing Girls Vs Boys. Fortunately, when he says the word "sexy", the rest of the band give a friendly groan instead of fixing me with cold stares. I suppose as labels go, it could be worse.
"When we're creating the music," Eli smiles wryly, "we try to isolate ourselves from wondering what people are going to think. You just have to think, 'Is this cool? Is this turning me on?' But once the record's done, you have to resign yourself to promotion and marketing, which is all about smoke and mirrors."
Do you take refuge in amused irony, then, when all sensible women - sorry, I mean people - start to lose their cool?
"That's our existence," smiles Scott, his voice hosepipe-ban dry. "Amused irony. I think you nailed that one."
It's even stranger when you consider that, for all the supposed sexiness in Girls Vs Boys' music, it's hard to pin down lyrically. And I know. I looked for the rude bits. Only in the interest of research, of course.
"People just make it up," Johnny Temple (bass, keyboards, cult book publisher) shrugs. "It's implied."
"If I had to spot the rudest line?" Scott furrows his brow. 'The sleaziest? I'm just trying to think. Frankly I don't think there's that many. I've had people ask about that before and I'll say, 'I don't think there's anything rude on there'. and then they come up with a line and I say, 'Oh yeah, that.' That's one of the only problems we've had with the 'Girls Against Boys Are A Sexy Band' angle. Any sexuality in the music is subtle, it's not there on paper. Cos we're not cock rock."
So if it's not cock rock, what is it? Electronica? Well, yes and no, say the band.
"We definitely wanted to bring in more electronic stuff," nods Eli. "My friends from DC started playing me dance records where there was a lot of interesting stuff being done: good sounds and strong arrangements. I still think the silence between the notes is as important as the notes, but it's definitely a bigger sound. We wanted to expand the layers."
"The thing that was really attractive," adds Johnny, "is that our sound has always had something in common with the dance music we like: incredibly repetitive, and bringing in bizarre noises that sound cool."
"It was interesting moving away from the alternative thing which believes in music being supposedly 'real' into this completely mechanical, created-by-computers ethic. 'Oh, it sounds like a machine playing it'," Eli quotes your typical rockboy. "Well, yeah, it's supposed to sound like a machine's playing it! In our case, though, even if we started out with an idea that was a loop, we would always play it live, so it still had a groove to it. But it has a sort of machine ethic."
"I didn't know we had a machine ethic," interjects an amused Scott. Scott's recovering from an early-morning hotel bar marathon, and - although hitherto a heroic chainsmoker - a two-week affair with nicotine patches.
"Yeah, machine ethic!" Eli laughs, hamming up the Gary Numan implications. "I am now a slave to the machine!"
The American music world isn't particularly machine-friendly, as it happens.
"Oh. Totally," Eli nods. "Electronica never really happened to the extent that record companies thought it was going to. In America at least, The Prodigy sold a lot, but that's about it. But for us, so-called alternative music just got very boring and bad. all that stuff labelled alternative which is really just pop songs with loud guitars."
"Fundamentally, even this record is much less mechanical than organic," Scott continues. "And live, these songs are going to fit very well. Even records like ("Freak*On*Ica" precursor) 'House Of GVSB', when you listened to it, was different from the experience of seeing us live, which was always more mayhemic. It'll be the same thing here."
I decide to let them in on the real reason why women love saying Girls against Boys Are A Sexy Band. You're perfect for winding up blokes: men might like the music, but when they're informed of our opinions about the something-extra factor, inevitably say plaintively, "Sexy? Really? Which one did you say was sexy?"
Perhaps you can't expect them to feel entirely comfortable with the idea in a musical world of boys (or boys with Fanciable Babe in front) playing music for boys. A state, incidentally, which prompted Girls Against Boys, in their DC moshpit days, to adopt that name in the first place.
They absorb my insider scoop with some delight.
"That's just great. That's great, heh heh heh," Scott replies with a particularly dirty chuckle.
"Sexiness is in the eye of the beholder anyway - hey, who was that woman who insisted that you weren't sexy?" Johnny turns to Scott with the tone of someone recounting An Unusual Event.
"Yeah," Scott shakes his head. "She was saying, 'I don't find you sexy at all.' And after a while you find yourself thinking, 'What, not at all? Not even a little bit?'"
"Tell her to go have a drink!" Alexis suggests, laughing.
"Actually," Scott concludes, with devastating casualness, "eventually, this argument we were having started to sound kind of, you know, sexy."
Machines can do a lot of things, but I haven't found one that lifts an eyebrow quite like that.
By Jennifer Nine