By Kimberly Chun

Kira is a loser, plain and simple. She hates everyone in this group and tells others what assholes we are, what a bastard Greg is, etc. She thinks that no one tells anyone anything. She lives in a dream world. She must be out of her weak little unbathed mind. She does all this, gives everyone shit and thinks everything is OK. Come September we start looking for another bass player for the band Black Flag.

Henry Rollins, Hallucinations of Grandeur

(Illiterati Press, 1986)

BASS PLAYERS - they're the glue between melody and rhythm, and they're holding down the fort, the foundations of song, but are often discouraged from taking a solo. No wonder grudges are harbored and resentment nourished. You can't live with the Bad Boys II star, you can't live without down-low melodicism and thwack.

Considering how often the words Black Flag are uttered in the presence of Bay Area band Battleship – down to someone yelping "Henry Rollins" at the start of Battleship's unreleased demo Hearts Addendum – it makes sense that the group might have as checkered a relationship with their bass player as the spoken word spewer might have had with Kira Roessler.

I watch Battleship vocalist Aleksander Prechtl, guitarist Daniel Martins (Rock and Roll Adventure Kids), and drummer Drew Eastman grinning crazily as they dig a hole in the shifting sands of Ocean Beach and then fill it with bassist Gene "Beans" Bae, clutching a broken instrument and wearing a button-down shirt ripped from the back of some misguided nine-to-fiver who once tried to steal Martins's guitar. "Some thieving square," Prechtl complains, as the three throw more sand resembling dirty white chalk over Bae, and admire their handiwork.

The alternate idea for the Bay Guardian photo shoot was a re-creation of the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter. "We had all kinds of bad ideas," Martins says. Bae gamely crosses his eyes for the picture, the sand gets in our mouths, and strollers heading up to the Cliff House crane their heads. Summer fun.

Prechtl, 25, busts out a portable grill, ears of corn, and veggie burgers for the gaily macabre image of Battleship sucking down Tecates and snacks beside the imagined corpse of their bass player.

A scruffy dude yells down from the sidewalk above the mock death/beach party a-go-go: "Hey, can I have one of those burgers?"

"They're not really burgers," Prechtl answers.

"What?"

"They're Boca burgers," the singer explains earnestly.

"Oh. Can I have one of those Boca burgers?"

"Well, if you want one that's uncooked," Prechtl replies, still serious and simply interested in making himself understood. "They're frozen."

"Um, OK."

Mmm-mm, nothing like a little hardscrabble reality to scrape up against a comically gruesome photo shoot. Never mind the dead bass player in the hole, "de-bassed," for our amusement – those guys never get any respect. We are a disappointment: The body is warm and the burgers are cold, as are the cans of beer. But Battleship get a laugh out of, not the panhandler's plight, but the unintentional humor eked out of Prechtl's sincere interest in connecting with the would-be burger meister.

You can keep the tumultuous, damaged swing of last year's Presents Princess EP (Raw Deluxe) and the chatter that ensued after the record went out of print. Battleship, like so many Bay Area bands, are still all about the live experience, happenings that hang on human connection, if not actual bone-crunching contact.

Of course, they're also about barbecue, judging from the recent scene at Martins's home (along with Jason Smith of KALX, and Oscar Michel of the Gris Gris and Rock and Roll Adventure Kids) at the so-called Cereal Factory, where Battleship performed in the dark, tiki-decorated rec room/basement alongside Dada Swing, Murder Murder, and K.I.T. As Martins threw oysters on the barbie, the aroma of oats, fruit, and Cocoa Puffs floated across the street from the West Oakland factory, a strangely beautiful and ramshackle art deco cathedral/sugar shack to carbo-loading.

Battleship fuel up on buckshot energy that is somewhere between larky joyride and serious-as-a-heart-attack median collision. Throw in fragments of earache rock (both punk and post-), an urge to scrap, and a will to group-hug a sense of unhinged – yet somehow unclichéd – chaos, and you have a band that can inspire avid, unsolicited documentation. (Who were all those photographers capturing Battleship at the Hemlock Tavern in July?)

At that appearance, Prechtl made a point of invading as many audience members' personal space as he could, dragging his mic stand like a wooden leg across the room and then back – his long hair webbing his face like a net. The small but riveted crowd gave him a wide berth and repositioned themselves rather than party directly with Prechtl, but crucially didn't leave. Resisting the rules of order and hierarchy between performers and spectators, in the anti-grand Bay Area noise tradition, Bae, 31, and Martins, 25, played on the floor around Prechtl, until the bassist took his opportunity to climb and briefly balance atop Eastman's bass drum.

Bombs away

Shit happens – at Battleship shows: Members have gotten hit by lit fireworks, and legend has it that Bae once accidentally hit ex-drummer Joe Haener's girlfriend in the face with his bass, breaking her nose. She also dreamed up Battleship's name, but there's no direct connection between the idea and the injury.

"I always like to stand behind them when they play or way in the back, because I don't want to get hurt. People beating the shit out of each other," the Gris Gris's Greg Ashley opines over the phone during a Midwest tour, joking that "they're total scumbags."

"One time I saw them playing, maybe at the Stork Club," Ashley says, "and Alex fell off the drum set and busted his face open, bleeding everywhere and shit – Daniel playing guitar with fucked-up tunings sounding like Sonic Youth, and Bean playing some of the weirdest bass lines."

The Oakland psych-garage savant recorded Presents Princess last year in an old downtown meat market, where he placed Haener (also in the Gris Gris and Rock and Roll Adventure Kids) in a mondo-creepy, cavelike burnt-brick room with a huge meat hook. Tucked into the bowels of the storefront last-stop-for-steer, Battleship and Ashley managed to capture the energy of their show, which Raw Deluxe owner and Maximum Rocknroll contributor Mitch Cardwell appreciated. "The first time I saw them, they were completely great: very tight, but at the same time very wild and very fun to watch – and when I heard the recording, I thought they captured it perfectly. Some other local bands can really put on an entertaining live show, but something gets lost in the recording."

"I just thought they were a great band," he continues. "The first time I saw them, I thought they were incredible. They really floored me. Their live performance was all over the place, very energetic and really chaotic. But you could still tell there were really good songs there."

Not shying away from engaging the, well, enemy – or audience – is key to Battleship's game, as they confess later over tacos, margaritas, and smooth jazz beneath the Beach Chalet. "I like frontpeople who aren't afraid to make fools of themselves," Bae says. "Alex was very much not lacking in that respect."

"Possibly drunk," the vocalist interrupts. True to their brawling nature, Battleship like to step on each other's lines, until one opinion sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor.

Me, I'm deaf from the Quiet Storm. "Awesomely drunk?"

"Awesomely drunk too. Possibly awesomely drunk," Prechtl says before demurring. "Depends on the kind of music. But I also do kind of like people who throw themselves around and make either dangerous situations or seemingly dangerous situations. So I've always been a fan of Iggy Pop and uh, who else ...?"

"I can name them for you. Rollins. Henry Rollins," Martins says with an ironic edge.

"I do. I like every Black Flag singer," Prechtl says. "Though actually Henry Rollins was a kind of boring frontman."

Never-say-quit energy is the most important ingredient in winning the war, according to Martins. "It's about getting so much energy, to the point where it feels like it could collapse at any moment."

"That's kind of what we're going for," Prechtl adds. "We don't want to hurt anyone. We don't want to hurt ourselves. But we want to bury him." He gazes affectionately at Bae.

"We just want to hurt Bean," Martins says.

"That's because I'm the guy in charge, and they always want to take me down," Bae cracks.

"It's a metaphor for the state of the band," Martins adds, happily. "I think maybe he's the focus for a lot of our creative aggression."

"I think they're just jealous of my age and my wizened ...," the bassist looks for words for his John Waters-style mustache, newly grown a week after an in-house facial hair-growing contest at SF's Amoeba Music, where he works. It's beyond belief, let alone words.

Brothers by other mothers

Bae and Prechtl obviously have something special going on: They first found each other and formed Battleship's previous incarnation, ¡Las Munecas! (the Marionettes, or Spanish slang for "the Queers"), around 1998 in Santa Cruz. Manhattan Beach native and UC Santa Cruz graduate Bae was been working at a record store when Prechtl relocated from his native San Diego to attend school.

"I think the first time I saw him in the store, I said, 'I hate that guy,' " Bae recounts.

"He didn't like my record selection," Prechtl says.

"I think you were just kind of loud. And then less than six months later, we ended up playing music together."

Prechtl had befriended ex-Glass Candy member Melanie Goldberg (also of Feather Gong) and was playing guitar with her in Hate Mail Express. Later Bae extricated himself from the house party scene in Santa Cruz and moved to Oakland and formed Short Eyes; Prechtl followed three years ago, drawn by the idea of living in a "mythical" Oakland warehouse, making art, and putting on shows.

He had attempted to form a band called Habitforming in Santa Cruz with Comets on Fire's Noel Harmonson, and tried to do the same in the Bay Area with Bae and Haener, until they realized there was another group in town with the same name. Haener brought Martins, a fellow Rock and Roll Adventure Kid, into the band shortly after it began, and several name changes later, Battleship began to test their mettle in local warehouses and art spaces like Grandma's House, the French Fry Factory, LoBot Gallery, Limnal Gallery, the 40th Street Warehouse, the 12th Street Warehouse, and the Hazmat House.

In a tip of the stocking cap to Bae's high school Deadhead roots and Martins's affection for Phish, the group began to write songs collectively, by jamming at length, talking, arguing, and jamming again.

"When I feel like it's going nowhere, I give my two cents," Prechtl says. "We do get in not-heated debates."

"I'd call them heated," Martins says. "Then there's always one of us yelling, 'Let's just play, OK? C'mon!' "

They just attempt to follow where the process takes them, bickering constantly as with all matters ("My favorite e-mail debate is 'We're not leaving for tour if you bring your clothes in a paper bag,' " Bae says with a laugh).

Chop, shop

Ashley says he bugged Battleship for a while about recording them in his butcher's storefront, and he managed to accomplish just that last year before he was evicted for setting up a studio. He recalls, "We all just locked ourselves in there one night, Battleship and the Gris Gris, and smoked a shitload of weed and recorded this noise all night. They're going to use some of it on their next record, and I'm going to use some on my Gris Gris record."

Meanwhile Battleship were surprised to find the 500-copy run of the EP selling out "very, very quickly," says Cardwell. "Battleship and myself are all record collectors, and so we designed the pressing and manufacturing of the records to appeal to record collector-type people." About 100 were pressed on white marbled vinyl, and by hand they silk-screened the EP jackets with avian artwork designed by Chris Duncan of Needles and Pens.

"I'd say their sound is consistent with a lot of stuff that people associate with Los Angeles and San Diego these days," Cardwell continues. "But one of the main reasons that drew me to them, after seeing them play so many times, is that they just appeal to a really, really wide audience: People who love garage punk, or people who like newer, hipper post-punk stuff, or people who like noise. Something in their sound or the way they approach music is definitely very, very punk, but they also do things that are more daring and experimental."

Cardwell allows that he's somewhat biased, but nonetheless he says, "They kind of get lumped in with bands that people tend to talk a lot about like ... the Coachwhips. The vibes they generate live happen to be similar. There's this anything-goes, very energetic crowd response, and they feed off that as much as the crowd appreciates them. People talk to me a lot about them. After the record had sold out, I started to get a whole lot of requests all over the country asking for more records – they heard it at a friend's house – and there seemed to be people more interested in Battleship outside the Bay Area when the record went out of print."

He fielded calls from other labels in California and abroad interested in releasing the CD version of the EP, singles, or a full-length – "As soon as the record came out, the label people really picked up on it" – and the band ended up choosing Flapping Jet Records to release a new 7-inch. Raw Deluxe will release Presents Princess on CD in time for a US tour in September.

Meanwhile Battleship – primarily products of southern California and the UC system (Martins grew up listening to indie rock in the San Fernando Valley before moving to the Bay to attend UC Berkeley) – are fine with analyzing their strategy, between talking about Prechtl's independent study project linking anarchism and tour booking, and Martins's scholarship on the connection between musical taste and footwear ("That really just came from us flyering for a show, and we had a couple days to do it, and we were like, 'We'll just flyer everybody, but make sure you get these people wearing these shoes [Converse].' And it was really effective.")

Bae hits on a Battleship motto: "This might come out really lame, but we're, like, 'too smart for rock 'n' roll and too dumb for art rock,' which I think is great. Because I think a lot of straight-ahead rock 'n' roll is really dumb and some of the straight-ahead art-for-the-sake-of-art rock is so cerebral it's not enjoyable."

And whether they're arguing over Black Flag or Foucault, the good-natured fight songs, the dialectic, the battling never stops.

"My major sounds more intellectual," Martins huffs (anthropology).

"Yeah, well, I studied Lacan," Bae replies (American studies).

"So did I."

So how does Lacan apply to Battleship?

Bae doesn't even need to think. "Only in the mind games with these guys."

Battleship play a benefit for cancer research with Numbers (in honor of Lowdown's Hugh Holden) Wed/3, 9 p.m., Ivy Room, 858 San Pablo, Albany. Call for price. (510) 524-9220. They also play Aug. 30, Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. Call for time and price. (510) 444-6174.