Major indie rock Hot Hot Heat take their quirks to the masses BY NICK SYLVESTER
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"If I want to say something, I’m just gonna say it. I mean, I don’t give a fuck about shit," Dustin Hawthorne, bassist for Hot Hot Heat, confided to me in late 2003. The British Columbia band had just played to a sold-out crowd at Boston's Axis nightclub, and at the invitation of the Harvard Lampoon, they reconvened with groupies in tow at the humor mag’s castle immediately afterward. As the night fell to purple haze and questionable dice rolls, Hawthorne laundry-listed other things he didn’t give a fuck about — how many records his band sell, what ’80s new-wave acts critics say his band rip, "other shit." Each tick mark dripped with old-guard indie elitism. "It’s just the kind of guy I am."

Self-defensive, self-indulgent, defiantly insular, uncompromising, and — let’s say it — pretty damn offputting at times, the indie-rock world’s kind of guy has but one value: artistic integrity. The "doing my own thing, man" ethos is at the least admirable and, in its ’90s major-label sort of way, maybe even charming. At once anti-pomp and anti-populist, "indie" says fans will dig the shit or they won’t — no harm done, no compromises needed, please, no more handclaps, always 100 percent human shit and never any top-down label-to-artist creative control. From there follows the simple but crucial distinction between indie- and major-label rock, no matter what label you happen to be on: the first is art, the second is product.

More and more though, bands like Hot Hot Heat, Franz Ferdinand, the Postal Service, the Walkmen, Death Cab for Cutie, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Modest Mouse are collapsing that distinction. Indie in ethos, these acts made unprecedented mainstream media inroads in 2004. With Franz Ferdinand’s "Take Me Out" as its flagship, indie took back rock radio from new metal, mall punk, and all that other Nickelbullshit that’s run the road for almost a decade. Just as important, indie rock has appeared with unusual prominence in television and film: TV drama The OC once teased an entire story line out of a Walkmen concert, and in Garden State, Natalie Portman’s character says without a smirk that the Shins "will change your life." Indie rock has become shorthand for purity — freedom from corruption, really — and as Intelligent But Heartfelt Youth Music, there’s hardly a better choice.

The indie sound is selling pretty damn well too. Right now, the indie-centric Garden State soundtrack is #1 on the iTunes top-album chart. The Arcade Fire have continued to jump up Billboard’s Heatseekers chart, and a few months ago, the Postal Service’s Sub Pop debut, Give Up, a bedroom IDM pop record, reached 400,000 in sales, going right past Sub Pop’s third-best seller, Hot Hot Heat’s Make Up the Breakdown (230,000), and second only to Nirvana’s Bleach (1.6 million). Plenty of bands have jumped from indies to majors, but only recently has indie self-indulgence itself been the selling point.

Elevator, Hot Hot Heat’s major-label follow-up to 2002’s Make Up the Breakdown, could be indie’s next major commercial success. Backed by Warner Bros., who signed the band to Reprise after initially handling national distribution for MUTB, Hot Hot Heat approach a mainstream audience that’s not only willing to give their herky-jerky new-new-wave sound a go but also just flat-out relieved by how much fun it is — especially in the wake of all the Bizkits and Parkies and Insane Clownfaces.

Steve Bays, Hot Hot Heat’s lead singer and one of the band’s two principal songwriters, recognizes this increased pressure, but he isn’t shaken by it. "People tell us, you know, ‘Now’s the time for bands like you!’," he says over a cell phone from the Vancouver airport. "‘Don’t lose the momentum! Keep things going!’ We had to make a conscious effort to physically distance ourselves from all that."

Especially since their genre’s so in vogue at the moment, Hot Hot Heat, who return to Boston to play Axis this Monday, staved off pop to salvage an identity. Living in Vancouver — which is to say, not living in New York — certainly helps, but Hot Hot Heat were far more neurotic, writing and rehearsing Elevator several hours away from Vancouver in an abandoned Victoria barn they had fitted with electricity.

The distance benefitted the band, it’s clear, but what about that thing about how major-label-record execs make all the major-label bands’ creative decisions? For acts like Hot Hot Heat, whose believability lies largely in their DIY quirk, majors can stay away from top-down cynicism and instead play off their own glut of prefab — customers sick of the slick now have a crunchy, supposedly more authentic indie alternative. For now, the situation’s win-win. Says Bays, "Until we really screw something up bad, they’re gonna trust our instincts, which is awesome. Fortunately for us, we wrote the songs we wanted to write. There wasn’t any label pressure. But there was pressure from our inner critic. We really didn’t want to be the kind of band that just repeated the same record, but at the same time we didn’t want to get so introspective and self-indulgent that we lost our audience. Whether or not it’s cool to admit, we still want to keep our audience."

After several self-imposed delays, Hot Hot Heat finally flew down to Los Angeles in August to record. The band’s hotel, stuffed with porno shoots, child actors, and Blind Date contestants, was "as LA as it gets," Bays recalls. That and what sound like some serious bug problems. "I remember once I looked up and right on my pillow, it was like a millipede, but it was purple, and I squished it and purple blood came out. One morning, these ants were so bad, they were in my shower even. So I killed a bunch of ants, and when I came back that day, all the dead ant bodies were gone because the ants remove all the dead bodies, which I thought was kinda cute. I guess it’s some pride thing that’s built into their genetics."

Six weeks of recording and maverick extermination — Make Up, by comparison, took only six days — allowed Hot Hot Heat time for some serious detail work, the band stuffing their songs with as many melodies and odd sounds as they could think up. That said, crazy guitar effects and underwater drum sounds are worthless if the songwriting’s shit. Bays and drummer Paul Hawley know how to write good pop songs, however, and like their last album, Elevator is brimming with good hooks. Duran Duran, XTC, and the dB’s get thrown around as touchstones (I’ll throw in Spizzenergi and a little D-Plan), but between Bays’s inimitable tenor and the band’s resistance to cool, Hot Hot Heat are the clever and infinitely more fun counterpart to electrified peers like the Killers, the Bravery, and the Faint.

"You don’t need to take yourself seriously to be taken seriously or to command people’s attention," Bays asserts. "We’re neurotic about the songwriting, obviously, but I don’t want to detract from the entertainment value. For most people, they throw it on and you have five seconds to convince them it’s a fun record and to keep listening to it."

Elevator sticks to traditional fare — getting old, breaking up, being bummed — so the focus is on what Bays does within those themes. First line in, the dude’s a total word playa: "Witless humorless conversation has filled me up like an old gas station/I’m wallowing in a pool of gasoline." Elsewhere, as on "Ladies and Gentleman," he navigates serpentine verse schemes: "He was in the habit of taking things for granted. Granted/There wasn’t much for him to take."

Bays also touches on the Hot Hot Heat biography, making oblique reference to the band’s indie-to-major jump. The strain of heavy touring, in fact, was the reason guitarist Dante DeCaro left the band after they’d recorded Elevator. Bays’s feelings about the band’s metamorphoses are summed up on "Move On," a B-side to their GB-only "Bandages" single: "Can’t believe they never bothered to move on/Can’t believe they never ever change."

At some point between now and two years ago, Hot Hot Heat realized the dead-end DIY/indie mentality no longer suited them. And like other bands who’d arrived at the same crossroads, they were fine with that — fine with having fans, with playing sold-out shows, and with, for once, making some money. Now, though, they have to articulate their system of musical values. Bays’s makes an admirable attempt: "The difference between an indie-rock band and a straight-up normal rock band is that most indie-rock bands can’t sleep at night if they don’t feel like they’re putting up something that they’re proud of. Bands like Modest Mouse and stuff, those kinds of bands. The average rock band is more fine with making creative compromises."

But that’s just bullshit. Who’s to say Velvet Revolver aren’t proud of their album? Who’s to say Modest Mouse didn’t just shit out Good News for People Who Like Bad News with the intent of pleasing the maximum number of people? And when an album’s good, who cares whether the band are proud of their work? Existential crises can be fun, but Bays nails it: "I just do what excites me at the moment, then I try to articulate it later."

Hot Hot Heat headline Axis, 13 Lansdowne Street in Boston, this Monday, March 7, with Louis XIV and the Information; call (617) 228-6000.