Coquet science

>> Le rock sexy, c’est Louis XIV

SUFFERIN’ SOVEREIGNS: Louis XIV

By ERIK LEIJON

San Diego-based Louis XIV, with their latest record, Slick Dogs and Ponies, have been harshly cast off by a frigid music press as nothing more than chauvinist, hyper-sexualized garage-rock revivalists, an assessment based on their multicultural flirt anthem “Finding Out True Love Is Blind.” The band got a bum rap from those who forgot that music used to be rebellious—that a shirtless Robert Plant once proclaimed he would give you every inch of his love, or that T-Rex could cake every song with layer upon layer of glam pastiche without shame, or even every stylish rap video from the ’90s. Alas, it’s a fun-loving quartet from Southern California with a flair for mixing suggestive metaphors with clever wordplay that has incurred the wrath of puritanical finger-wavers.

“There’s an image that’s been worn into articles,” says frontman and guitarist Jason Hill of the band’s reputation for lyrics laced with double entendres. “People write about how I’m so conceited and I think I’m the cat’s meow. I’ve been called racist and misogynistic.

“You hear songs like, ‘If you’ve got a big dick, let me search it, find out how hard I gotta work it,’” he sings, quoting from Missy Elliott’s “Work It,” “but I can’t say anything even remedial in terms of flirtatiousness.

“The [provocative] lyrics aren’t even nearly as much on this album but we still get the same articles. People still want to talk about sex, like I’m the only person who’s having sex.”

As an example of the snowball effect, the group was banned from the city of Hoover, Alabama in 2005 after the local parent-teacher association got wind they were going to play a show on school property in the small town.

“They called an emergency meeting and they showed everybody the cover of our last record [which features a naked woman seen from behind, with the album’s track listing written on her back], and they rambled off some of the lyrics. It’s hysterical because, not long afterwards, Snoop Dogg played there.”

Despite the negative attention the group’s lyrics may have received, it’s precisely their straightforwardness when it comes to sexual themes that has endeared them to fans of both genders. The band, which also features angelic voiced Brian Karscig on co-lead vocals and guitar, Mark Maigaard on drums and James Armbrust on bass, very purposefully distanced themselves from 2005’s The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, expanding their sound to include a string section and elaborate productions that resemble a massive ’70s rock opera rather than the tenuous garage rock comparisons that accompanied their last record.

Hill, who produced both albums, says they had the opportunity to experiment as “there was no one in the studio to tell us no or to focus on one thing.” The end result was over 70 recorded songs, since the group would frequently jump from one idea to another.

For those who think the band has softened by introducing a string section and by toning down the sexual innuendo, rest assured that Louis XIV have retained their devilish precociousness. They still have sexy videos featuring scantily clad women (and possibly one featuring Hill’s girlfriend nude, if he wasn’t being facetious) and they will still draw ire for songs like “There’s a Traitor in This Room,” where they encourage a girl to get freaky in a taxi.

“It’s all really weird,” Hill says. “When those songs were written, it was really about just getting my girlfriend to smile.”

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