w/Panther
Thurs May 1, Re-bar, 10 pm, $7.
It started with a videotape, passed through the underground last fall like a piece of hot cult property (which it is).
Marked with orange tape and labeled "Zeigenbock Kopf" in black Sharpie, the tape contained two videos by the act of the same name: The first was a black-and-white Tom of Finland fantasy come to life, with mustached men in sunglasses smoking and jerking around stoically, as an angular-faced frontman blew cigarette smoke and deadpanned lines about liking boys and their toys. The other, titled "Men's Room," was in color and showed a crowded men's room packed with leather daddies who wanted to "escape the dance floor" by sharing tight stall spaces together. The music was a mix of smutty ghetto-tech and the dirtiest-sounding bass attacks possible--noise that threatens to cannibalize your speakers after it blows them out like a suicide bomber in your stereo. All hearty fuzz and heavy beats, the tape had all the romance of an alley fuck between trashcans, and all the allure of a flirtatious tongue on your neck in the middle of a crowded dance club.
Then, in January, a CD came out on KimoSciotic Records. Titled I.D.M. ("I Dig Men"), the disc made the videos look like child's play. With songs like "Ass & Mouth" (sample lyric: "Show me the difference between your ass and mouth") and "Hot Cocks on Fire" ("Thanks for the ride, now take off those fucking pants, sit back, smile.... I can tell it's been a while"), the record is 100 percent macho man-on-man action. It's backed by nasty drum beats that were sampled and layered with thick distortion, and human beatboxing mangled into mechanical pumps and grinds, with fried feedback squeezed between hits. It's the soundtrack for techno-Kraut gutter sluts, made by three "Germans" from San Francisco who started working together six months ago--Hans and Uli Bunschlapen, and Meister Detlef--and who recently released a second, equally fucked-up record called Nocturnal Submissions on Tigerbeat6.
Hans says he came up with the idea for Zeigenbock Kopf because of the testosterone excess already invading his other band's shows (Dig That Body Up It's Alive, but he was also in Pink & Brown). "I started realizing that I wasn't liking the shows because they were all dudes bro-ing down and shit and no girls were getting in the mix, and when they were, they were freaked out by these dudes who were like, 'I just got out of jail!'" He decided the next logical step was to make music specifically for men. "For that much man-on-man power, you had to step over into the German industrial theme, the most manly music of all time," he says. "We wanted to make it hard and dirty because nothing was quite hard enough or dirty enough to satisfy our urges." Musically, Hans says, "I don't think anyone's ever heard anything like it, although it's a total Brainbombs rip-off--it takes this band that's really offensive and is really heavy and rocks really hard, but makes a techno version out of it."
After writing 60 songs in three months--Hans says there's enough material for a third album, but he's sitting on that one for a while--he's hit the wall and doesn't plan on any new material beyond what's written. Although he did recently touch on what he calls his coup de grâce--a slow song with the lyrics, "Hard cock, out on the street, pointed to, where the boys meet." "It's about boys hooking up," he explains. "About walking out of your house early in the evening and getting filled with the feeling that you're going to have a good time. I think everybody can relate to it--like sometimes you can just leave the house and know that if you're on the hunt, you can get laid, and for a boy anyway, you can almost feel like your cock is pulling you toward the destiny of the night."
Live, the band has only played a couple shows, which have both pissed off those who didn't get the parody and emboldened those who did. "I had one guy suck my dick at a show and that didn't bother me," he says. "It seemed to freak other people out more than me." His list of performance injuries includes "road rash from getting wedgies and having my pants ripped up and down repeatedly through the whole set, and a sore package from getting grabbed so much," a situation he's remedied by stripping naked at times. Hans says the shows are getting more "antics-ridden" as they go along, which is snowballing due to the increase in "drug and alcohol consumption," and he encourages his crowds to get dirty as they want to be.
"In the end, I want to take this to such an extreme that nobody can do this again because we ruined it for them," laughs Hans. "I want it to be like, 'Okay, we sang about butts and balls so much that nobody else wants to think about it anymore.'"
