‘Post-Punk’ Band Headlines Tour

Make Up the Breakdown, the title of Hot Hot Heat’s latest album, is cryptic enough to fuel the overly creative minds of critics and fans alike. It works perfectly as an attack on the sort of musicians who imprint their discs with fabricated tears and scars. And it is a jibe at publicity-hungry artists who spill tales of conflict in the studio to feed the chaos-friendly media.

But Hot Hot Heat guitarist Dante DeCaro says he isn’t interested in futilely over-analytical readings.

“We just kind of like the way a lot of our song names have repetition,” he explains. “I learned it in high school. It’s like alliteration or something. It kind of bounces off your tongue.”

Hot Hot Heat is currently headlining their own North American tour and stopped off at Boston’s Axis club last week. The show was an exercise in pure manic energy, with singer Steve Bays howling and leaping around the stage like a pill-popping Energizer Bunny.

The set kicked off with “No, Not Now,” showcasing Bays’ throbbing synth beats as he bellowed, “Oh no, she’s not a secret now / The wolves have smelled her scent.” The crowd—mostly glasses-bound pomo punks and largely female—moshed appropriately to highlights “Touch You Touch You” and “Oh, Goddamnit.” The band concluded the short set with massive audience sing-alongs to their hit “Bandages” and encore “This Town.”

DeCaro says the winning formula to the band’s selection of set lists is quite simple.

“We consider things like whether the song’s up-tempo,” he says. “So the whole vibe at the show is that everybody gets grooving.”

Thus, while you can marvel at the band’s artistic credibility and pin them with labels like emo or post-punk, you’d better be bobbing your head while you’re doing it.

And if you want to explain to Dante that the term he’s looking for is “assonance,” not “alliteration,” forget about it. He couldn’t possibly care less.

Hot Hot Heat blazes onto the scene just as a new wave of emerging musicians are learning lessons from the Sex Pistols and the Clash while taking night classes with ABBA. Though the band shares the manic energy of the garage movement and the infectious melodies of the new wave revival, they’re a little too radio-friendly for the former and too raucous for the latter.

Still, they’re not particularly eager to be identified with any specific trend. DeCaro says he’s wary of the press’ insufferable desire to pigeon-hole a handful of bands into a movement.

“That’s another thing that media likes to do,” he says. “They think things sound better when they’re all part of a package. But there’s so many bands in that kind of garage or new wave genre.”

DeCaro also wants the media to back off with the Nirvana comparisons.

“That’s just people trying to make a nice, entertaining story,” he says. “Nirvana’s definitely a band that, when I first became a musician, were very inspirational. But at this point I listen to so many things.”

If DeCaro is a little bitter, it can’t be blamed on his band’s recent fortune. Their hook-riddled single “Bandages” is in rotation at the country’s largest alternative rock outlets. The song’s music video, borrowing heavily from the facial surgery scene in the 1985 film Brazil, maintains heavy rotation in its third month on MTV2.

And every music magazine and its mother seems to feature a glowing article fawning over the band’s fresh sound, headlined by some strained variation of the band’s name (prime examples include “Heat Wave,” “Hometown Heat” and the none-too-clever “Hot Hot Hot”).

But the amassing hype and bombardment of media coverage barely fazes DeCaro.

“It’s part of the job,” he says nonchalantly, shrugging off a year’s worth of New Musical Express cover stories and Spin raves. “I guess you can never see anything that’s in the near future.”

It’s unlikely that the band foresaw any of this fame when they formed in the island city of Victoria, British Columbia in 1999. Hot Hot Heat originated with current bassist Dustin Hawthorne and drummer Paul Hawley, later bringing on board DeCaro and lead singer Steve Bays.

The band’s initial songs were synth-based but leaned violently towards punk. As they began playing more shows and generating some major local buzz, they gradually smoothed out their sound. They released a handful of EPs, eventually amassing them into a full-length entitled Scenes One Through Thirteen.

The band’s big break came when Sub Pop Records, former home to such ground breaking acts as Soundgarden and Nirvana, signed the quartet. The band’s releases on the label, the Knock Knock Knock EP and their second LP, Make Up the Breakdown, have firmly established their reign as kings of Canadian punk.

Naturally, the band’s unique style drew attention from major labels.

“It was the next logical step for the band,” DeCaro says. “There were a bunch of labels interested. Even the people at Sub Pop felt that the record would be better in the hands of people who could get it greater exposure.”

The band members eventually agreed to a contract with Warner Brothers Records, which arranged to re-release Breakdown with increased support from radio and MTV. With the label behind them, the group left behind small Vancouver clubs to play alongside the likes of mainstream superstars No Doubt and indie heavyweights the Shins.

They also kept up the touring, banging out their crowd-pleasing anthems with a wide variety of bands, such as Radio 4, the Pattern and the Walkmen. Their main goal with their live performances, DeCaro says, is pure entertainment.

“When we play a live show, we want it to be as fun as possible for ourselves,” he says, “and the best way to make fun it for us is to make it good for the audience.”