Darkness and light

If you think the Fucking Champs are fucking around, you’re fucking wrong.

“We mean every note we play. Our tongues couldn’t be further from our cheeks,” says Josh Smith, of the sonically destructive guitar-and-drums trio. After all, not many bands proudly tote a manifesto, much less one as serious as this: “The solitary aim of the Fucking Champs is to destroy weak music and its purveyors by simultaneously rejecting and exalting the tenets of classic rock idiom.”

In Smith’s words, the “weak music” to which they begrudgingly refer comes about when “people don’t put enough into [their songs]. So much of it is about fashion nowadays; it’s just all Jeff Beck haircuts and boring three-chord structures.”

In response to these trendy bores, the Fucking Champs have created their own musical genre: Total Music. “We didn’t want to be limited to any standard-issue key signatures,” Smith explains. “In terms of how the melody weaves through the song, we keep a real open book in terms of the tonal palette. We have songs where Part A works into Part B which works into Part C. But Part A and Part Z don’t have to have anything to do with each other unless you want them to.”

With goals so clear and a philosophy so complex, it’s hard to believe that anyone would think twice about passing the Fucking Champs off as a mere joke. Yet, their screaming guitars and Iron Maiden-esque harmonies might deceive a first-time listener into making weak comparisons.

“To an outsider, hearing certain types of amps locates us genre-wise for a lot of people — whether arena rock, ’70s metal or Metallica. It’s all about where people are coming from, and where they are located style-wise,” says Smith. “By touring in the more indie or punk circuit, a lot of people hear all of the obvious signifiers that say it’s metal. And they think that because we’re on Drag City from Chicago that we’re some sort of joke, or that we’re trying to make an ironic statement.”

If any sort of statement is being made, it’s that the Champs are dead serious about bringing the almighty riff back to the forefront of rock. Their new LP, V, contains no bass or vocals — just thundering drums and some of the loudest guitars ever committed to disc. Listening to the album, it’s clear that the Champs have defined an entirely new brand of heavy. “We didn’t want to rely at all on the traditional rhythm section and lead voice thing,” says Smith of V.

Instead, guitars and drums work in blistering unison, building each song to a dense crescendo of pounding percussion and smoldering riffs. Stop-and-start rhythms and unpredictable time signatures create a thick soundscape that leaves very little breathing room. Luckily, the Fucking Champs include enough synthesizer and acoustic guitar interludes on their albums so that the listener can recover from the audio barrage. V even includes a three-guitar rendition of Bach’s “Air On a G String.”

The juxtaposition of quiet interludes and more frantic tracks exemplifies the Champs’ appreciation of contrast.

“One of the problems I have with music is the way that, if a band has something dark to it, it’s just dark all the time. To me, that makes it lose meaning really quickly,” says Smith. “Anything good is going to have light and shade. You just can’t be smashing out minor chords all the time.”

So when the Champs switch from what Smith calls “Juicy Fruit commercial material” to discordant thrashings to epic and triumphant guitar harmonies within the same three-minute song, the effect is all the more stunning and dire.

Just try and say “Fucking Champs” and “Dokken” in the same sentence.

The Fucking Champs play Tues., June 4, at The Earl, 488 Flat Shoals Ave. Drunkhorse and Monte Casino open. 10 p.m. (doors). $8. 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com.??