Sex Bomb

It's all been tried and retried and tried all over again. The guitar-bass-drums format has been explored so often, Rand-McNally sells directions. If it doesn't have Sonic Youth's fingerprints on it, it probably has someone else's. So the worst mistake that Girls Against Boys could make was letting people believe they were doing something different, that maybe, just maybe, rock 'n' roll wasn't the exhumed corpse it appeared to be.

It seems like a foolish notion now, but back in 1993, when the band released Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby, it wasn't that hard to be convinced. Hell, anything would have sounded new next to Pearl Jam's unholy resurrection of Kansas and Bad Company and the Stone Temple Pilots' unsavory revival of Pearl Jam. The double-bass, oversexed vibe of Venus Luxure was a pimp-slap in the face of Big Dumb Rock, a sharp, sexy striptease of an album. It was dance music for the post-punk set, made mostly with guitars and basses and drums -- all the things that people had just about given up on.

At the time, it felt as though the band could have been the future of rock 'n' roll, or at least a return to its lustier past. Rock 'n' roll used to be all about sex: It was Elvis the Pelvis and Jim Morrison playing cocks-and-robbers on a Florida stage. It was the Velvet Underground's lurid nights and Van Halen's steamy days at the beach. Venus Luxure was a continuation of that, a record full of sidelong glances and back-alley encounters.

Unfortunately, it's five years later, and the mainstream has caught up to Girls Against Boys. From the sound of it, the band let it happen, meeting mediocrity in the middle of the road. They've given up on the guitar-bass-drums format too, trying to keep up with themselves by adding more samples and keyboards and turntable scratching -- 15-year-old innovations. The band's new album -- Freak*On*Ica, its first for Geffen Records -- sounds almost like a parody of themselves. Who would have thought that the group, brought up in the annoyingly ethical D.C. hardcore scene, would become the new face of corporate rock?

"I don't think we're really corporate rock, even though, in a way, we are," says singer/guitarist Scott McCloud, on the phone from a tour stop in Athens, Ga. "We were never bothered too much by all the label stuff. We don't care that much about being on the radio or anything like that. It's not important to us. We just want to make music the way we have been, and let people hear it however they hear it. We don't really consider this selling out, because that's pretty much the goal of any band, isn't it? To have people hear their music."

Still, it's hard not to think that the band compromised itself a bit on Freak*On*Ica. It's as clean and safe as the group's last three records were dirty and dangerous, a trip through Disneyland compared to a trip through the back room of a strip club. For an outfit that used to be all about sex, the album has all the sensuality of a $3 hooker. The familiar elements are still there -- McCloud's gruff whisper, the rumbling grooves -- but all the rough edges have been rounded off. Girls Against Boys made the same mistake that many bands do when they go in to record their first major-label record: They spent too much time in the studio and overanalyzed the hell out of their album.

"I think we were definitely in the spirit to try things," McCloud says. "It took forever. I think House of GVSB [the band's 1996 disc] took five weeks, and this took several months. Going into recording it, we purposely went to a studio that we could afford for a long period of time. We didn't go to a superchic place, something that was $5,000 a day. We went into it saying to ourselves, 'We're gonna try not to worry too much about how long this takes. We're just gonna try to do it right, the way we want to have it.'

"I think it's an interesting way to record, having never done it before, to record for so long. Being in a studio, definitely your focus wavers. I always describe it like, 'Well, this time, with every song, we could examine every avenue of where the song could go, and then go back to our original idea.' "

The original idea of Girls Against Boys is a long way away from the sound of Freak*On*Ica. The group began as a studio project of bassist Eli Janney and Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, but was never intended to be a real band. The project was a reaction to the D.C. hardcore environment in which Janney and the future band members had grown up -- a male-dominated, politicized scene that, musically at least, relied on guitars and not much else. Janney's project widened it to include the heavy bass sound of D.C.'s go-go band past, along with angular guitars and samples. He released a few albums under the Girls Against Boys moniker -- including the Nineties vs. Eighties EP in 1990 and Tropic of Scorpio in 1992.