Partying Hard with Mr. Brownstone

The stringy hair of Glen Danzig, the suggestive sneer of Gene Simmons, the denim flash of David Lee Roth's high-leg kick: Like G.I. Joe's freakish nemesis, Serpentor, Andrew W.K. seems a carefully engineered genetic amalgamation of a number of his baddest-assed forebears. And like those he follows, Mr. W.K. manages to achieve the perfect hubris/hedonism admixture that makes him an irresistible live performance of the sort that compels women to willingly donate undergarments to him and men to inflict injury to themselves and others while they dance.

Mr. W.K.'s songbook reads like a manifesto proclaiming his personal philosophy, which is, in short, to party hard. "Party Hard," which is in fact the title of his first U.S. single, is one of only three tracks on his debut album from Island Records, I Get Wet, that has the word "party" in it; the other two are "Party Till You Puke" and "It's Time to Party." The album title derives from Mr. W.K.'s dictum that "in life, if you go full bore, you're bound to get wet." He achieves levels of Teutonic bombast as he exhorts his listeners to come "together as a party in celebration of possibilities, potential, and opportunities."

Mr. W.K. was already dripping when he took the stage at the Bowery Ballroom on March 26, and the audience was soon to be likewise as he and his backing band raced through a frenzied, sweaty sub-one hour set. What one realizes prima facie about Mr. W.K. is that he takes having fun seriously. Very seriously. If an audience member is able to climb on stage, he or she is invited to sing a line or two into the microphone before Mr. W. K. himself (who is impressively enough muscled that he seems not to need any concert security), hurls him or her back into the clamoring audience. He pulls especially vociferous concert-goers onto his shoulders and marches, a la the early WWF tag team the Bushwhackers, around the stage. And he crowd-surfs like no other rock star since Eddie Vedder dropped from the ceiling in the video for "Even Flow."

Many of his songs are noticeably similar, though "Party Hard" and "I Love NYC" were met with particularly Dionysian uproar. Mr. W.K. claims to have, "spent thousands of hours on this album making it sound like he didn't spend thousand of hours on the album," and as a result, it can sound a bit one-noted at times when listened to at home. Though all of his songs are crisply crafted, a listener can get the feeling that there is no real direction or drive to the album. This remains true during his live performance; it seems less like 12 distinct songs than like one long ecstatic noise. This is the desired effect, though, as Mr. W.K. mercilessly pounds away at his listeners' eardrum in the hope of lifting them into some state of prolonged euphoria. Like a Tae Bo instructor, Mr. W.K. dominates his audience's will for a pulsating 45-minute workout. Everyone leaves lighter in the head as well as in the body, breathless and wet.