Manic 'New Wave' From Hot Hot Heat

Hailing from Victoria, Canada, Hot Hot Heat are the latest band to mine musical riches of the golden age of punk and new wave. But no matter how much singer Steve Bays' high-pitched, fluttering vocals sound like Robert Smith, please don't compare them to The Cure.

"People always say we sound like The Cure and we've never really been happy about that because we don't agree with it," guitarist Dante DeCaro said, talking on the cell phone from the band's tour van. "But most of the other bands we're compared to are fine."

With the band's angular riffs, sing-along choruses and highly danceable rhythms, DeCaro could well be referring to The Clash and the early recordings of Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Their first album on Seattle's Sub Pop Records, the head-bopping Make Up the Breakdown — produced by Jack Endino (Nirvana's Bleach) — is also their last for the label; soon after its Oct. 8 release the band signed with the Universal Music Group.

"Victoria influenced our sound significantly," DeCaro said of the band's native town, where they formed three years ago. "It's isolated and it's on a small island and there's very little influence within the city or even from outside, so the people in the city are left to their own devices. I think that's one of the reasons that our sound ends up sounding a lot different from other bands. We weren't growing up in a big city, so there wasn't any pressure."

The lyrics on Make Up the Breakdown deal with anxiety, breakups and overall unpleasantness. "Bandages on my legs and my arms from you," Bays sings on the musically upbeat chorus to "Bandages." On the insecurity anthem, "Naked in the City Again," Bays sings, "Lost and naked in the city again/ Begging for a piece of their attention." Oftentimes the band's pogoing, carefree music is in stark contrast to their pessimistic lyrics; the relentlessly toe-tapping beats "make up" while the consistently depressed lyrics "breakdown."

Album highlights include the poppy, manic "This Town," which features a reggae-style bridge, the grimy dancefloor synth-fest "No, Not Now" and the cowbell-happy groover "Talk to Me, Dance With Me."

Hot Hot Heat have borrowed from punk, new wave and funk to come up with a relatively original sound. "If you really know a band and know what they're all about you can just get the vibe out of them," DeCaro said of his own band's influences. "And if you get in touch with the mind set they're in you don't really need to take actual pieces of music. You can be influenced by them without copying them."

According to DeCaro, the band — vocalist/keyboardist Steve Bays, bassist Dustin Hawthorne and drummer Paul Hawley — has been influenced by musical visionaries as sonically diverse as Bruce Springsteen and Nirvana.

DeCaro sees the recent glut of punk-inspired bands, dubbed the "garage rock revival" by many media sources, as both a blessing and a curse. Like most artists he doesn't really care to have Hot Hot Heat lumped with a bunch of other bands. "I think the media does that because it appeals to the largest amount of people in terms of categorizing and labeling us," he said. "I don't think it's necessarily true and we don't feel that we're trying to do that. But, then again, that scene being successful has opened the door for us for a lot of press we wouldn't have normally got."

At live shows, Hot Hot Heat's brand of hip-moving, danceable rock doesn't always work well with their typically "too cool for the room" hipster crowd. "We don't like that at all," DeCaro said of the rigid, arms-folded indie mentality. "We try to prevent that from [happening] at our shows. It doesn't always work but I like to think that we get people moving more than most bands. We were in Toronto the other day and everyone just stood there and clapped. We don't like that, and we want to put an end to it. It's just more fun to move around, and we move around and it brings everything to life."

When I talked to DeCaro, his band had yet to sign the major-label contract with Universal, but he did allude to the frustrations that go along with being an independent band and his hopes for the group's future. "I think that recording an album would be a lot of fun if we had time," he said. "In the past it was always such a rush because we never had much of a budget to sit around and fuck with different things. So one day I hope we have a lot of time in the studio to make it a whole new thing. Not necessarily throw on more stuff, but just to perfect it." — Ryan Dombal [Thursday, Oct. 31, 2002]