by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“They’re all my sisters,” says CSS drummer Adriano Cintra of his bandmates Lovefoxxx, Carolina Parra, Ana Rezende, Luiza Sá and Iracema Trevisan. “I feel like I have to protect them because people—especially in Brazil—can be real assholes and say stupid, nasty things.”

From middle class São Paulo, Brazil, the sextet known as CSS (Cansei de Ser Sexy) are as hot as a band called “tired of being sexy” oughta be. The worldwide buzz over their bratty electropop and disco-punk anthems began with their pages on Fotolog.com and Brazil’s version of MySpace, Trama Virtual, who released the band’s eponymous album last year, before they were signed by Sub Pop.

Cintra and his art-school-girl cohorts were so thankful for their online acclaim that they started telling journalists that they’re from the WWW rather than Brazil. But the Internet giveth and the internet taketh away. Stand-alone sites and online newspapers have spread misinformation about CSS, such as “the band is notorious for their emphasis on style, fashion and coolness, rather than musical ambitions” (Wikipedia) and “[they] began a band as a joke because they couldn’t play any instruments” (The Guardian).

Cintra, who’s played guitar for renowned Brazilian band Thee Butchers Orchestra for 10 years, after studying classical piano for a decade, is certainly the most experienced of the group, but the ladies learned to play guitars and keyboards on their own over a period of years before forming the band. In Brazil, however, that’s not good enough.

“If you didn’t study for years and know all the scales and all the chords, you don’t know how to play,” says Cintra.

The punk spirit of the Slits, Chicks on Speed or le Tigre seems lost on the average Brazilian—CSS have had much more success in North America, Europe and the U.K. than at home—but it’s apparently equally foreign to Playboy’s music critic, who had his share of “nasty things” to say about CSS. Based on their band name, he imagines them to be “a bunch of sexy bronzed Amazons shaking like Robert Palmer’s backup dancers. Sadly, CSS can’t live up to that male fantasy, or much else, for that matter.” He goes on to compare their lyrics to “a preteen’s diary” (granted, they have a song about Paris Hilton), complaining that singer Lovefoxxx “only flirts with the triple X rating” with lines like “suck my art tit,” and chastising the “sly indie references” of the song “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” (that’s DFA 1979, RIP). However, following a show in Rio (where the “very macho men” consider Cintra to be slumming with the “retarded girls” of CSS), one Brazilian critic took the trash-talking crown.

“He was a tiny fat man, bald but he had long hair, he was wearing a Rainbow shirt, you know that band Rainbow?” asks Cintra, trying to suppress laughter. “And he wrote an article saying, ‘Apart from their music being bad, they’re not sexy at all, they’re ugly, like monsters.’ So I wrote him an e-mail to say, ‘Okay, you’re a short man with a big belly with no hair and still you grow a ponytail?’ Really, he was the filthiest person I’ve ever seen.”

With Ladytron at Metropolis on Sunday,
Oct. 1, 8 p.m., $22.50, all ages

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