h, The Fucking Champs. The Champs are quite possibly the only band in the world with a primary audience comprised of indie kids whose music has not a shred of My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Beatles, or Kraftwerk influence in their music. This nearly inexplicable conundrum is only exacerbated when one actually listens to a Fucking Champs album, which makes it very clear in about five seconds that the band's musical roots are from the Megadeth, Iron Maiden, and Black Sabbath side of the tree. Indeed, I doubt there is a band still playing music anywhere that is more dedicated to preserving the unabashed guitar riffage of heavy metal from 1985- and riffage is what they love most, because V, in typical Fucking Champs fashion, is completely devoid of bass guitar and vocals. This is a good thing, unless you were a big fan of the vocal stylings of people like Dave Mustaine and Eddie Van Halen, in which case it wouldn’t really be difficult, and might even be appropriate, to smoke a big bowl and just pretend that one of them was singing.


As it is, the lack of vocals is one of the only things to set apart the Fucking Champs from the aforementioned bands on many of their songs. Another is that there can be no doubt that the Champs are skilled musicians, playing their instruments with technical precision and displaying virtuoso guitar solos that would make Yngwie green with envy. The Champs do add a little something extra to the straight-ahead metal on many of the songs; the “Never Enough Neck” suite contains some extremely fluid guitar arpeggios, “I Am The Album Cover” has some suitably spacy prog-metal guitars, and “Aliens of Gold” exhibits an intro of warm keyboard washes that Rob Halford would never approve of.


It does, however, (usually) take more than trippy keyboards to get indie approval, especially when most indie kids would never admit to ever having had any affinity for Van Halen or Rush. The indie credibility is, at least in some portion, derived from the fact that the lead Champ guitarist is Tim Green, ex-guitarist for the mighty Nation of Ulysses. No, you are not alone if you find it strange that Green went from being a key member in a groundbreaking band that specialized in spouting stimulating revolutionary rhetoric to being a key member in a derivative instrumental hesher-metal band that specializes in making indie music fans contemplate cutting the sleeves off their old Camper Van Beethoven shirts. Perhaps this evolution makes more sense when you consider the fact that the politics of Nation of Ulysses as often as not seemed to be playing a big joke on the hipsters that loved them so; there isn’t much that could be a bigger joke than seeing a bunch of Pavement fans headbanging because someone told them it was OK to rock out to this particular batch of songs, even though they could conceivably be outtakes to Rush’s Moving Pictures album. Or maybe the fans get the joke, and love The Fucking Champs that much more for even attempting to play it on them; but there can be little doubt, with song titles like “Nebula Ball Rests In A Fantasy Claw,” “Aliens of Gold,” and “Crummy Lovers Die In The Grave” that Green and his bandmates are well aware of the inherent irony of the music.


In the end, that is what makes The Fucking Champs likeable and bearable for more than a few songs. I am under the definite impression that they take their music very seriously in the sense that they try very hard to make it sound good, and it does indeed rock. I wouldn’t hesitate to throw it in the stereo at a tailgate party before the baseball game, for example. I’d like it even more because, like any hipster, I’d like to think that I’m in on the joke when the meatheads started rocking out to it; in that sense, the music is very tongue in cheek and fun in spite of the heavy metal aspect of it. It may sound a lot like Megadeth or Rush at times, depending on which song you’re listening to, but The Fucking Champs are never as pretentious as Rush or as vicious as Megadeth. Basically, they make a pretty sly mockery of both the music and the fans they are associated with; they want you to have fun and laugh at you at the same time, sort of. Or maybe they just want you to rock out like it was 1985, if you’re into that kind of thing; if you’re not, just console yourself with the thought that The Fucking Champs are smarter than they sound.