January 22, 2003

By Kimberly Chun

HEAT SEEMS TO follow Victoria, Canada, quartet Hot Hot Heat wherever they go. Their first album, Make Up the Breakdown, came out this fall on Sub Pop to much – forgive me – buzz, and the incessant hum hasn't really abated since they signed in October with Sire/Warner Bros. Maybe it has something to do with their sound: extremely catchy, effervescent, and upbeat pop rock reminiscent of Spoon, the Faint and, most important to many, the Strokes.

Then again it could just be their name, dreamed up by drummer Paul Hawley.

"It's very rare to hear a band's name and have an opinion about it," confesses woozy vocalist-keyboardist Steve Bays. "A lot of people will say, 'When I heard your guys' name, I thought it was the stupidest name I heard,' or I'll hear the opposite. 'I thought that was such a cool name, I had to check you out.' "

It wasn't a conscious attempt by the band to claim some kind of hot title for themselves, or maybe even be considered hot boys of a sort, Bays adds, a tad nonplussed by the idea. "That's weird. I think if we were more physically attractive, we might be worried about that," he says. "I really actually never thought about that, that we'd be thought of as hot guys. It's so over-the-top cheesy that it's not cheesy."

"Cheesy" is a word that comes up a lot for Bays, who sounds extremely aware of how the band's infectious and downright bouncy pop hooks might be considered uncool. Those tunes have put Bays, Hawley, bassist Dustin Hawthorne, and guitarist Dante DeCaro on a treadmill of press, videomaking, recording, and touring, including this week's San Francisco stop.

Yet despite the manic schedule, the 24-year-old Bays comes off as endearingly vulnerable, idealistic, and uncoached during a recent phone interview, rolling the ends of his words so that "hair" sounds more like "hahr," "clothes" more akin to "claws."

And breaking one of the cardinal rules of how-to-handle-the-media school, he admits he's dopey on Tylenol 3 after recent foot surgery. "I'm just a little high," he says sweetly.

Hot Hot Heat's debut will get rereleased by Sire and Sub Pop in the spring with a bonus song, videos, and behind-the-scenes footage, and then they'll be touring the West Coast, the rest of the United States, and Europe for the next six months. But it all seems to chafe against the very nature of being a musician, Bays observes. "The kind of people who get into music aren't necessarily the kind of people who are career-oriented. I'm stressed over that," he says. "I think musicians in general are just emotional people and they like to have their close friends around, so it's just weird to voluntarily put yourself in a situation where you lose the ability to hang out with cool friends and a girlfriend."

Hot Hot Heat didn't anticipate this situation when they began four years ago as a "mathematical" punk band, as Bays describes it. Contrary to their seemingly overnight attention, Bays says all of the members have paid their dues, developing deep in their native, incestuous Victoria music scene, playing punk, goth, death metal, emo, jazz, noise, and skate punk in various bands. Bays took on vocals and keyboards a year and a half ago, joined by the group's first guitarist, DeCaro, and he brought along a poppier musical sensibility and a rhythmic, emphatic singing style. "We started to add soul to the band, basically," he says.

Keyboards were a stranger fit for Bays – they just seemed "dorky." I tease him about Jan Hammer, his portable keys, and the Miami Vice soundtrack, but that doesn't really comfort him. "I didn't want to play them at first," he says amiably. "Keyboards just aren't synonymous with cool. It's not like a Bruce Springsteen album where you see his ass and a guitar or whatever. It's just not cool, and it's not classic."

After working on their album's songs for about a year, Hot Hot Heat went into Mushroom Studios (birthplace of music by Heart and Bachman-Turner Overdrive) in Vancouver and later Hanzsek Audio in Seattle to record and mix for six whirlwind, meticulous days with renowned grunge producer Jack Endino, who praised the band via e-mail last week: "It was upon seeing them live that I suddenly 'got' what they were doing and saw what could be done with the songs in the studio. As a fairly 'new' band, the best thing for me was seeing how they took my constructive criticism and ran with it... The band has high standards. Oh yeah, and they rock, in a strange early-'80s, guitar-crunchy dance-pop kind of way. Good musicians, all of 'em, and Steve has a great set of pipes." Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie later remixed six tracks on the album, encouraging the band to experiment with dirty compression and, say, rerecording guitar in the bathroom.

Now fully immersed in his overheated career through the recording of their next album this summer, Bays says he's just trying to have fun to keep the neurosis at bay. When they're driving all night to another show, he says, they like to joke around and scandalize each other, when Hawthorne isn't trashing bedrooms out of sheer boredom. "We also kind of all have alter egos, where we all of a sudden become a redneck guy for an hour," he explains. "I have this, like, industry guy alter ego, and I use big words that are very vague and don't have specific meaning, but you say it really confidently, and you say it with a New York accent, and you drop a lot of names. It's like a biz guy."

Sure, they can laugh. Bays says he doesn't think of the band as the next big thing, the next hot boys, or the future boyfriends of Kelly Osbourne. "I just think the music is really good. A lot of bands kind of have like a shtick, or a theme or a selling point, whether it's their image or how they're marketed, but I think with us, we pay a lot of attention to detail, in music, everything from how it's recorded to how it's mixed. We're just music nerds, basically. Some people think the stars were aligned, but I think we're catchy and fun, and every rock band in the past 10 years has been so dark and gloomy and mysterious; I think people just have a desire to hear fun music."