Pitchfork

A few months ago, on a weeknight when I just wanted to catch the "American Idol" results and be in bed at a reasonable time, I was coaxed out by some friends to catch a set by those young, Manic Panic-coiffed Brazilian indie kids Bonde Do Role. Tired and cranky, I gave Bonde my best arms-folded, disdainful rock critic ice grill for as long as my shriveled Grinch heart could hold out. I wasn't quite sure when the band finally won me over-- was it the track that chopped up Europe's "The Final Countdown" or when singer Marina Vello stuffed her microphone down the front of her tights and began air-humping with Pretty Ricky vigor?-- but my crankiness quickly melted away in the face of the trio's pungent and playful shtick, oversexed and overdosed on the beat from Tone-Loc's "Wild Thing".

Bonde do Role are constantly bracketed with CSS and Diplo in the press. The Diplo connection is obvious: The dilettante cratedigger discovered them on a vacation to Rio and released an earlier EP on his boutique label, Mad Decent. But forget the association with CSS, the adorable day-glo cult cargo that washed up on American shores at roughly the same time: They may share an unusual fashion sense (Marina, sporting a Paul Revere and the Raiders-style pudding-bowl haircut, stuffs herself into a pair of too-tight leopard print stretch pants), but Bonde's jones for baile funk, the popular fusion of hip-house, Miami bass, and Latin beats that rose to international prominence in recent years, thanks in part to championing from a number of acclaimed DJs, sets them apart.

With Lasers, the group's debut album, opens with a Van Halen hammer-on, Gregorian chanting, and a growling computer voice that falls halfway between Vincent Price and the iron man who kicked off Rob Base and DJ EZ-Rock's "It Takes Two". And what we get for the rest of the album isn't so much indie kids versioning baile funk as... antmusic! Maybe it's just the fact that 10 of its 12 songs clock in under three minutes (some barely squeak to two), or that the platonic baile funk beat sounds so much like an off-brand Latin version of the Burundi stomp with some added Salt-N-Pepa snap and pop, but you can totally imagine Marina as the take-no-shit 21st-century Annabella Lwin with bandmates Pedro D'Eyrot and Rodrigo Gorky acting as the two-man Bow Wow Wow behind her-- especially on "James Bonde", with its distorto-twang surf guitar, or the Bo Diddley cruise-ship sound of "Tieta".

Bonde do Role may have inherited their homeland's love of really crappy sounding 808s and breakbeats that rattle like coconuts in the breeze, but they friggin' love cheesy guitars. I mean, terrible sports bar blues-band buttrock licks and 90s grunge grunts (an earlier single turned the detuned wah riff of Alice in Chains' "Man in the Box" into a dance hook), and the hairiest of hair metal. Just like baile funk. And also like baile funk, you can't really describe it as "ersatz" because the whole genre is ersatz as fuck, and Bonde's baile is one, two steps from the "real" thing. Cheerleader chants and horny panting! Incredibly cheap programmed drums and pop culture quotes! Booty bass beats and inexplicable Afrika Bambaataa shoutouts played on Todd Terry's vocal-chopping keyboard! (Bonde loves the vocal stutter effect almost as much as they love guitars.) As with baile funk, this low-budget throwback is an aesthetic virtue for Bonde do Role. It's a building block-- the horns on "Tieta" are as tinny and off-the-rack as any Trinidadian soca hit, while "Caminhao de Gas" rocks and the 8-bit video game hook-- not a necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention third-world practicality.

Those of us lacking a functional understanding of Portuguese will have to approach the chants as universal party-starting sex-urge noises that go beyond language-- which isn't hard to do, really, since Bonde probably aren't exactly flipping Rakim or Lil' Wayne level metaphor. If With Lasers suffers for anything, it's the fact that no one's figured out a way to get sweaty leopard print crotches onto CDs just yet. I do wonder how much of my enjoyment derives from my memories of the Bonde do Role live gig and its awkward but non-ironic booty popping, pheromones, and spilled beer. But there's still a lot of pleasure to be had during the humid months this year in imagining the Bonde kids shaking their barely-legal, jiggling stuff as they trade off raps on record like Run-DMC. And if you're part of the generation that's erased the distance between dancing and dry humping, With Lasers should easily get you through a long, hot summer of awkward hook-ups at backyard barbecues.