(RockAndMetal.com) (08/02/04)

By Michael Bennett

SAN DIEGO, CA, USA - Revelation Records has announced the signing of San Diego Experimental Punkers THE PLOT TO BLOW UP THE EIFFEL TOWER.

The band are already in the studio with San Diego legend Rafter Roberts (Black Heart Procession, Kill Me Tomorrow, The Album Leaf) recording their next full-length album, "Love In The Fascist Brothel."

The guitars buck hard, shudder, and then smack head-on into the drums.

Then comes a slippery squiggle of sax that wails and pulls WWII-era Chicago bop jazz into the dirty streets of San Diego, California, circa 2004.

The singer grabs the mic and yells, bug-eyed, "I'm choking on the sweet taste of honey!"

A tiny punk club on a college campus. Red walls, vegan cookies, and 'zine-racks near the back.

Four sweaty kids on stage, and an erupting crowd of hundreds at their feet, scaling the stage, dancing around them, leaping off their amps, screaming into the mic, arms wrapped around the singer, fans becoming the band, filling the stage until you can't tell who's who.

The lines of artist/audience distinction blur and suddenly you are The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower, and you, and you, and all your friends, too.

The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower got together in 2001 to play a sinewy meld of Punk and wild Jazz, but has since left both genres to become something all its own.

Like The Contortions before them, The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower throw together a strangled, honking, damaged, and-above all-smart version of punk.

And you can dance to it. You have to dance to it.

The band invites it, brings you up on stage, pulls you from the stormy crowd and into the hot orgy.

Fuck Hardcore's sexless, P.C. rigidity.

Says singer/sax player Brandon Welchez: "We want all the boys and girls, regardless of what they look like or what their hang-ups are, to feel like they can come up on stage with us and take off their clothes."

"It has become a sexual relationship we have with our audience. We turn them on and they turn us on."

Guitarist Chuck Rowell agrees: "We want kids to steal the stage from us."

As says Rowell, it's all about kicking out the barriers between audience and entertainer: "We want there to be no boundaries between us and them."

"We all have insecurities, especially with our bodies and sexuality. We are the band that makes it safe to take off your shirt, feel comfortable, fight the school bully, and 69 the football captain."

"I haven't seen the beautiful, sexually-charged fiascoes we have on stage in any other city for any other band."

"I want every night on tour to be a stage full of sexual wonders, kids not afraid of adults or their secret crush or to dance along with us."

"Imagine! Every night, in every city."

Chasing their dark, savage, crazy-legged 2003 debut, "Dissertation, Honey" (Happy Couples Never Last), The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower released the "If You Cut Us, We Bleed" EP, showing an even more cohesive blend of the group's ideas.

The band's new material is very engaging and heavy, though more varied in speed and tone.

The bass dips and moans, Rowell's guitar juts out and stutters, Welchez's sax bleats and inter-riffs with the guitar, and the band spits into the mic -- a forward pushing mix of shouting, call and response, and pent-up singing.

But there are slower moments. Times when the band echoes Bauhaus' moody sprawl or Queen's victorious, slow-build triumphance-while always sounding, by and large, like TPTBUTET songs.

But below it all, gripping beneath the refreshing messages of sexual liberation, below the push and pull of rock show equality, the musical current is dance.

The term "dance punk" has been used everywhere from The Rapture to Blondie, but here it has reached a weird, new "Pinnacle A" level where the moves are pure spaz and joy.

Says The Plot To Blow Up The Eiffel Tower's drummer Brian Hill: "How tired are you of going to shows and standing there motionless for four hours? It's the pits, man."

It's taken us a couple of years, but I think we're now starting to get the kind of reactions we always hoped for. It's no fun playing to a room full of flat-liners."

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