CD Reviews

The Fucking Champs

VI | Drag

By MIKAEL WOOD | May 29, 2007

3.0 Stars

SERIOUS NOISE: If they were in it just for laughs, would the Fucking Champs call their new album VI?

These Bay Area boys have spent a decade-plus together wondering how many licks it’ll take to convince people that their instrumental heavy metal is no joke. Because they inhabit an indie-rock demi-monde of hipsters and scenemakers, the Fucking Champs have developed a reputation as hard-rock satirists, not honest practitioners of a lost art. Their taste for zany song titles hasn’t done much to correct that impression; included in this batch are “Fozzy Goes to Africa” and “That Crystal Behind You? (Are You Channeling).” Yet on VI, their latest full-length, the question the Champs beg is, why would anyone not truly committed to the form spend so much time constructing and layering complicated riffs? (Also: wouldn’t a group of individuals in it for the laughs title their sixth album something less straightforward — not to mention less accurate — than VI?) As if in demonstration of the band’s sincerity, these tunes shred as po’-facedly as any the Champs have recorded. Must they sacrifice all semblance of humor to make their point?

The Fucking Champs + Birds of Avalon + Red Fang | Great Scott, 1222 Comm Ave, Allston | June 3 | 617.566.9014

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[ 05/26 ] "A Natural Order," photographs by Lucas Foglia @ David Winton Bell Gallery

[ 05/26 ] George Orwell's 1984, adapted by Nick Lane @ Gamm Theatre

[ 05/26 ] "2012 RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition" @ Rhode Island Convention Center

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