Bottoms up Darkbuster get loaded, and the Konks go Bomp! BY BRETT MILANO

There’s one question you might not want to ask the members of Darkbuster. Go ahead and say their music sucks, or insult their families. Just don’t ask do they really drink a whole lot or is that just a put-on.

When we meet up at the Middle East in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that question is met with a shocked silence from the usually talkative band members, who then take swigs of their beers. "Do we really drink? You mean, do I drink like I did in Vegas last week, where I had that bacon martini? Believe me, we don’t do the David Lee Roth ‘ice tea in the Jack Daniel’s bottle’ thing." Bassist Mike Gurley continues, "We’ve been known to have a drink or two before a gig . . . no really, we don’t. We absolutely never drink before a gig. And make sure that Kevin [Kevin Patey, who manages the band with his wife, Mary Lou Lord] hears about that." Drummer Eric Edmonston adds, "You should be there when I have to carry the rest of these guys off the stage." Guitarist Danny O’Halloran concludes, "So that’s, uh, yes."

That’s the Darkbuster Boston has come to know and love: a bunch of friendly delinquents fueled by beer and irreverence. And that’s the Darkbuster you get on A Weakness for Spirits (on Patey & Lord’s Jittery Jack label) — but not all the time. The disc comes a full seven years after Darkbuster’s debut, with a break-up and a reunion in the middle. That debut wasn’t a joke record, but it’s the joke songs everybody remembers. Even the title, 22 Songs That You’ll Never Want To Hear Again!, was contributed by Edmonston after an especially tough mixing session. Those 22 songs included the trilogy of "Jerk," "You Jerk," and "You Fuckin’ Jerk" (each of which ran exactly as long as it took to yell the title), plus "Lilith Fair," a song aimed at every male rocker who got dragged to that event by his girlfriend. Then there’s "Amazing Royal Shaft," a true story of rock-scene intrigues ("Don’t laugh, it’s not as funny as it sounds/My girlfriend fucked the singer of the Royal Crowns").

There are some good yuks on the new disc, with "Grandma Was a Nazi" (about Lashley’s grandmother, a German ex-pat who really was photographed at a Hitler rally) already a local hit and "Cantaloupes" (as in, "He’s got balls the size of . . . ") sure to follow. But you know things have changed a little when the best song on a Darkbuster album (and the single) is "Shoulda Known Better," a punk/pop rouser in the proud Buzzcocks/Queers/Green Day tradition. Elsewhere, they refer to Iraq on "Armageddon Time," whose heavy-anthem sound is closer to Dropkick Murphys territory. And "Give Up Dope" is the kind of responsible statement they wouldn’t have bothered with earlier. It also makes sense that both Dicky Barrett from the Bosstones and Ken Casey from the Murphys add vocals, since Darkbuster seem likely to be the next "populist Boston punk heroes." And you don’t get that from jokes alone.

The idea that Darkbuster have matured gets the same reaction as the suggestion that they don’t drink. "I don’t think maturing is the same thing as getting older," says Edmonston. "We just got older. There were a couple of love songs on the first record, but we had a budget for this one. Before, it was like, ‘We have two hundred bucks, let’s go into the studio.’ " Lashley says, "I can say I was pretty miserable when we made the first record. Now a couple of us are married, and everybody has a significant other. But if it sounds more mature, it doesn’t come from drinking any less in the studio." Edmonston adds a more serious note: "I know this makes it sound like we take the whole thing lightly, but we don’t. We’ve all been on the road, we’ve been in different bands. We’re in it to win it."

Talk of Iraq also puts them in serious mode. Lashley: "Without getting too political here, obviously everyone in this outfit feels we should support the guys over there, whether you agree with the war or not." Gurley: "We started getting e-mails from guys in Iraq who were sick of all the CDs they had. So we got together with a bunch of other bands and wound up sending about 50 packages of CDs over. I just feel it’s normal kids who are stuck over there, whatever your political beliefs are. And there are different ones in the band."

Darkbuster also promise not to make any more bad business decisions, like breaking up a year after winning the Rumble. Their 2000 showing was pretty spectacular, with the band tearing up the house and the fans following suit. (The show even had to be stopped when a fight broke out.) Yet they called it quits after a less glamorous spell on the road. Lashley: "Thirty days in a van with five smelly drunk people . . . and that was the good part." Gurley: "I think the last straw was when the van broke down in a desert in California. We called U-Haul to pick us up . . . and they asked if they could call us back. On a pay phone in the middle of a fuckin’ desert." Lashley spent a few years doing acoustic punk with Lenny & the Piss Poor Boys before the band sold out their first reunion at Axis two years ago.

And the difference between the two phases of Darkbuster? Lenny points out, "Well, I don’t want to quit every day. And Eric is drinking again, so he fits in better." As for the pressure of following up an album that’s become something of a local classic, he says, "There was some pressure to come up with something after the Rumble, that was one reason we quit. This time, nobody thought we were gonna do anything, just that people kept coming up with songs until we had a record. And if you want to know about pressure, ask us on April 12, when we still have 2500 copies sitting in our basement." But when I suggest the album could cement Darkbuster’s status as a leading Boston band, Edmonston gets a little concerned. "You mean we’re not the biggest thing in this fuckin’ town already?"

THE RELEASE OF THE KONKS’ homonymous debut album should occasion a massive sigh of relief by all involved — but since it’s the Konks, let’s make that a raunchy sigh of relief with primitive drums and lots of fuzztone. Formed of former Bullet LaVolta and Coffin Lids members, the band have been a familiar and well-liked club attraction, winning the Boston leg of Little Steven’s national garage-band competition last year. But it was two years before they got around to recording a CD, and another year before the disc made it to the stores.

Bassist Jon Porth explains, "I thought it would never happen. I thought we’d just make an unreleased album that someone would discover someday and say, ‘Here’s some weird band that was around when all that lo-fi garage shit was happening.’ " The Konks recorded their CD on their own and shopped it afterward. First to say "yes" was legendary Bomp! founder Greg Shaw, a lifelong scholar and supporter of garage rock — some people think he even coined the term. Shaw, who died last October, was behind the Pebbles compilations, the first four volumes of which remain essential. Yet Bomp! had released very little Boston music — just a DMZ album of early demos and Willie Alexander’s solo debut in 1980 — until recent years, when he signed the Coffin Lids and the Turpentine Brothers.

So the band felt honored to work with Shaw, who they never met but corresponded with by e-mail. "We wanted to talk to him about different things he’d done, but all he wanted to talk about was the Konks," singer/drummer Kurt Davis recalls. "We suddenly stopped getting e-mails back from him, and then we found out why. And I felt guilty for just being concerned about my band." Adds guitarist Bob Wilson, "Your label owner dies, that’s about the worst luck you can have. And after all that, the record’s only out a month later than it was supposed to be."

The band’s trademark raunch translates well to the studio, even if the word "stereo" on the CD label is an outright lie: The disc was recorded on eight tracks and then mixed down to mono. But they didn’t go willfully lo-fi like their pals the Coffin Lids or Mr. Airplane Man. Instead, the disc has a warm and full mid-’60s sound, with such a heavy low end, you can barely tell that Davis’s drum kit consists of one snare, one tom, and two milk crates. "We got turned down by a couple labels who thought it wasn’t lo-fi enough," laughs Wilson. "But it had to be mono — that way you can have a broken car speaker and you’ll still hear the whole thing." In fact, the mono has as much to do with the band’s record-collector instincts as anything else. "We just handed the mastering engineer a copy of the remastered Raw Power [by Iggy & the Stooges, a wall shaker of a disc] and said ‘Make it sound like this,’ " Davis recalls. "I loved it when he looked at me and said, ‘That kick drum sounds a little weird.’ That’s because there isn’t one."

The disc also marks the first time Davis has sung on a record since Bullet LaVolta broke up in 1992. (In the interim he recorded two albums with Peter Prescott’s band Kustomized, but only as the drummer.) Davis ditched his old stage name Yukki Gipe years ago, and one assumes it’s a completely different experience to record a primitive rock album with little outside help.

All the band’s live standards are here, including "29 Fingers" (which celebrates an unfortunate run-in between Wilson’s index finger and a slamming bathroom door) and "God Says Whoa, Motherfucker," which sums up the universe with exactly four words of title and lyric (for propriety’s sake, the second half of the title doesn’t appear in the CD booklet). Two of their trademark covers are also here: Soupy Sales’s "King Kong" (which has to be the only song in the English language to use "King Kong" as an adjective) and a more surprising stab at Aerosmith’s "Let the Music Do the Talking." As Wilson puts it, "It’s always good to do a song people already know. Especially when it takes them a verse and a half to realize what it is."

The Konks’ CD release party takes place this Friday, April 8, at the Abbey Lounge, 3 Beacon Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts'sInman Square, with the New York band Andy G & the Roller Kings (including ex-Cramps bassist Candy Del Mar) and the Tampoffs; call (617) 441-9631. Darkbuster play an all-ages show this Saturday, April 9, at Axis, 13 Lansdowne Street in Boston, with the Ducky Boys, Far from Finished, the Skels, and the Dead Pets; call (617) 262-2437.