F_ _k you!

So it's no wonder that Cheater Slicks Don't Like You, according to the title of said CD (on In the Red) -- the entirety of whose liner notes are "Fuck you." Still, singer/guitarist Tom Shannon didn't have much of an ax to grind when we met for coffee last week, a few corners away from the band's Allston base. "God, I don't know what to say about Boston," he shrugs when the topic is brought up, noting that the band has played here only three times in the past year.

"It's kind of strange that we get no attention here. People in town should try to be more open-minded; believe it or not, this town has a terrible reputation for audiences. The bands I know [including Red Aunts, with whom they recently played a "Monsters of Low-Fi" tour] are afraid to play here because people aren't receptive. Some of them have only come to town because they want to play with us.

"On the other hand, our band can be a pretty difficult pill to swallow -- we're not naive about that. We don't try to make it any easier on people; just the opposite. That's part of our aesthetic."

If you've heard anything by the band before this month, it was probably the single "Walk Up the Street" (also on In the Red), a great but lesser-known Modern Lovers song that they covered last year. They've put out another single on the garage-crazed Crypt label; this one's an equally obscure Alex Chilton number, "Trouble Man" (from Chilton's heavy-into-heroin period). Cheater Slicks have also covered their share of '60s garage-band obscurities (drawn from Crypt's Back From the Grave and similar compilations), but they're not a garage band in the strict, "Louie Louie" sense. Instead they're drawn to big, primal, drone-and-blur guitar jams, which can run as long as 27:29 (the length of one track from their previous album, Whiskey). Obvious reference points: Stooges, early Cramps, 13th Floor Elevators.

"What do we like about those jams? Probably that we can get lost in it when we play them," Shannon says. "I like the brutal aspects of garage punk, but we also like to stretch out. Sometimes we're blisteringly loud, so it's hard to reproduce us. It's like Iggy Pop says: you can't feel that energy until you've stood in front of an amp. You have to control that feedback and that forward movement."

A couple of notable bass players -- Alpo from the Real Kids, and GG Allin's brother Merle -- passed through the line-up, but currently the bass is played by nobody (Shannon's brother/co-guitarist Dave Shannon and drummer Dana Hatch complete the group).

"My standard answer on why there's no bass player is that we couldn't find another good one," Shannon says. "But the real reason is that adding bass doesn't work as well; it messes up the dynamics of my guitar and Dave's. We like syncopation, and it gets too heavy if you put a bass in."

Cheater Slicks' first, now-deleted album was released in 1990 on Gawdawful, the label that put out the proto-grunge Suffer This compilation. Shannon recalls getting mostly blank stares from local audiences at the time. But they did get an early supporter in Jon Spencer, in his pre-Blues Explosion days, who had them open for Boss Hog. There was also a memorable show at the now-defunct Green Street Station club in Jamaica Plain, circa 1990. Death of Samantha headlined, and Cheater Slicks opened. And in the middle slot, playing to about 30 people, was Nirvana.

"They smelled like patchouli," Shannon recalls. "That may just be my own personal myth, but it's what I remember. I was a little hostile, I thought they were just hippie guys. I'm sorry now that I didn't get to meet them -- not because they got famous, but because everybody else from Seattle has been so incredibly nice to us. They appreciate raunchy rock 'n' roll there. I know it's a cliché, but I think we have more in common with Seattle bands than ones from here."

After a long association, Spencer stepped in to produce Don't Like You, the first outside project he's overseen (the second, believe it or not, is at least part of Beck's next album). Hearing the disc's grimy, basement-quality sound, you'd think it was the ultimate in low-tech -- and you'd be wrong. Because a few months' worth of studio twiddling went into it. All of the band's performances, including the vocals, were cut live-in-studio during a couple weeks' worth of sessions in late 1994. Then the band turned its tapes over to Spencer and got their album back the following year, in much different form than they'd left it.

"His mixes are pretty radical; they sound nothing like the way we recorded it," says Shannon. "He made it way crazier. He cut the songs up, edited them back together, had the guitar parts come in and blast out of nowhere." They were also surprised to find a song called "Sensitive Side" on the album, since they hadn't recorded anything with that title. "That was an instrumental jam that we played once and forgot about; we figured that Jon would use it somehow, but we didn't know he'd do that Barry White thing on top of it" -- referring to a spoken part that Spencer dubbed on, declaring his undying love for Cheater Slicks. The album's hidden track also sounded familiar. It was a crank call that Shannon had received at Karmi, the Allston used-record store he used to run, not knowing that the caller was Spencer's engineer ("Uh, do you guys have anything by the Pearl Jams?" -- keep in mind that the Jerky Boys were still popular at the time).

One could point out that the album sounds as much like Blues Explosion as it does like Cheater Slicks, and Shannon's willing to take the rap. "We knew that you couldn't take Jon's personality out, so some of it's going to sound like Blues Explosion. But it's also a give-and-take, because he used to see us before he started that band, and I think he took a little of the guitar sound from us. Some of our friends say this album sounds a little artsy, but I don't mind that." They promise to sound even more raw on their next album. Meanwhile, Cheater Slicks will keep their local profile intact and celebrate the release of Don't Like You by not playing a hometown album-release gig.

MILKMONEY

The sound is something like what you'd get if you took the vocals from, say, a Velocity Girl album and dubbed them over backing tracks by the Melvins. Milkmoney's vocals (by bassist Denise Monahan) are on the relatively sweet and poppish -- if a bit neurotic -- side, but the band favors lurching, metallic drones that plod long and slow (nine songs in 55 minutes). And the mix works well, with the vocals constantly undermining the bluster of the music. One could easily hear the tune of the opening "Two Hours" in a jangle-pop setting, but it would have been far less interesting that way.

At times the material is too thin to sustain such a lengthy disc -- then again, I felt the same way about both Velocity Girl's and the Melvins' last albums -- but the good moments are impressive. "Ghosts" features one of their better lurch-riffs and a nicely double-edged lyric (the chorus, "Sometimes I like myself," implies that one usually doesn't). And the title track is a slow-building, somewhat twisted seduction song with an effective "come on down" chorus and verses delivered in a come-hither tone: "Call me white trash, you don't know many girls like me." In terms of effect, it's Garbage's "Queer" without the cloying cuteness.

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