The Fucking Champs.

THE FUCKING CHAMPS ARE NOT REALLY A METAL BAND. While they have enough chops to make Yngwie Malmsteen wet his pants, they don't wear spandex or twirl their hair. Guitarists Josh Smith and Tim Green don't do that back and forth dueling rock pendulum thing (a la Glenn Tipton and KK Downing of Judas Priest), and drummer Tim Soete--who plays third guitar on occasion--doesn't have a flaming gong. And they don't play covers of "Running with the Devil." (The band is opting for a scorching rendition of Bach's "Air on a G-String" piece. "Our shit is so ridiculously simple compared to Baroque," says Smith.)

On stage at a recent New York City show, this San Francisco-based, all-instrumental power trio stand nearly motionless, looking down at their instruments, looking a lot like they're in a high school battle of the bands and really need to concentrate on just playing. And they probably do.

The Fucking Champs are heavy metal guitar nerds, playing only metal riffs, one alter the other after the other. "Everything depends on riffs and melodies to the exclusion of everything else. There are no chords and the drums are not exactly in pocket, but playing along with the riffs. We wanted everything to be very linear, flat, and two dimensional," explains Smith. The band sounds like Slayer on prozac, without any vocals or heavy metal's swords arid sorcery affectation. "It's not unlike death metal, which doesn't repeat at all and has no tonal center," says Smith about the comparison, "but the melodies that we write could be in a Juicy Fruit commercial, or the theme to Dynasty, or an Earth, Wind and Fire song."

The band was formed initially as a two guitar improvisational duo in 1992. Exploring Wayne Horvitz and Pigpen, Trout Mask Replica-era Captain Beefheart, arid Ruins, the freaky prog-rock duo experimented with different sounds--Smith even started playing a nine-string guitar. The band combined this art rock approach with its roots in mod (Green played in Nation of Ulysses) and thrash metal (Soete played in a sludge metal band called Lice) to develop this signature Thin Lizzy-meets-muzak approach. "We want the music to be constantly changing and focused on all the money riffs. It's supposed to be like Christmas morning, you are just opening up riff after riff," says Smith.

But the Fucking Champs are not some post-millennial ironic statement, as most of the rock press--licking their chops over the band's latest album, IV--has intimated. "If we wanted to be a goof, we would have made a more effective goof," Smith assures us. "There are certain schools of music that are the norm. If you exist outside of that spectrum, then people can't accept that. They seem to think that there must be something cerebral going [to rationalize why] other people like it. There isn't."

And the band has no interest in milking heavy metal revivalism, much less negotiating the politics of one scene or another, according to Smith. "It is usually 'nice shoes, I like the way that distortion pedal sounds, this is my whole identity, I am going to do these kind of drugs,'" Smith says with a roll of his eyes. "But the sound makes people go like this" he says, making the big rock sign with his forefinger and pinky.

Rather than changing their approach to leverage the band's newfound appeal, the Fucking Champs plan to concentrate on pushing their concept further. "I don't particularly want to mature or evolve, necessarily... it has taken us three years to get to this sound and angle of composition," says Smith matter-of-factly. "It would be nice to remove any last traces of cyclic agrarian farmer; you know, that sort of prison of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus."

The end result, says Smith, are songs where "the key changes so rapidly--like four times a bar--and there are so many melodies that we can't even hope to play it live." Now that's fucking metal.