There is a wind blowing from Bremen, Germany; it has more umlauts than you can count and it wants to suck your boyfriend's dick.

"Out at the Devil," the debut album from New York glammetal hairrockers Pink Stëël is a balls-out assault on heteronormative spooge-rock, tearing into the mise-en-scene of Motley Crüe and Poison with eight inches of love and a 33-and-a-half-inch guitar scale, both with your name on it, baby.

I have, as you might guess, been around the block. As a longtime music reviewer for Gothic.net, I reviewed hundreds of bands with names like Spaztic Pustule Eruption and Death is My Love, My Love, My Love. I've heard it all -- cryptohomo guitar-blowjob glamrock crossed with Swedish ambient-industrial, a Napalm Death-style all-midget Tom Jones cover band; an opera singer who gets fisted onstage while singing "The Magic Flute;" nothing can shock me and most of it doesn't even get a raised eyebrow let alone a "Dude, did he just say that?"

But the world of Pink Stëël is the totally unexpected pileup of perhaps the three most obvious four-beer-queers who have spent the last forty years spoiling for a drunken threeway while pretending they're just taking a "wide stance": hair metal, fagrock and glam-drag burlesque.

"The Pink and Black Bareback Attack," as PS is fond of calling itself, has been described as the marriage of Ozzy Osbourne and Oscar Wilde, but it's unquestionably Rob Halford of Judas Priest who should be having a chuckle and a serious wank over this one: As an out gay man who fronted one of the most influential metal bands of all time, Halford paved the way for gay men sick of Abba and metalheads sick of being in the closet.

But back to Der Gërmans: Stëël's principals are singer Hanson Jobb and guitarist Udo Von Düyü, bassist Klaus Schave and drummer Helmut Bang. They claim to hail from Bremen, Germany, which they of course are, every bit as much as John Wayne was Mongolian. The band's press has created a mythology around them that has Udo and Hanson, former high school mates on the swim team, meeting in a German bathhouse; Udo'd just lost his lover to a cantaloupe. Pointed questions to the band's publicist resulted in return emails asking "Don't you feel kind of hot in those cutoffs? Maybe you should take them off" and "Hey, let me get you a beer." Layering on the Germanic accents with a comic bluster worthy of Mel Brooks, they lay down hilarious gay-themed spoken-word routines between such songs as "Johnny, Are you Queer?" and "I'm Coming Out (All Over You)." Shortly after Devil's opening, there's a straight-boys-getting'-dirty porno routine that had me in stitches and signing up for the field hockey team. And what's not to love about a sonic assault entitled "We Fight for Cock?" These guys are the gay Id, flooding the world with hot gallons of steaming subversion.

But oh, it gets better: take "Frodonator," described as a Tolkien-meets-Stepford-Wives epic that sneaks up behind "The Battle of Evermore" and tickles its balls. Or "We Fight for Cock," which opens with the battlecry "Zis song is a song zat Charles Nelson Riley schtole from ze Beatles, und ve are going to schteal it back!" before launching into the line "Cock is our business, and business is good! We're buyin' with metal and we're lovin' with wood! I'm a full metal jacket and a son of a bitch! Suckin' on the metal of a trailer hitch!"


My favorite song on the disk, though, is "Sausage Party," which pretty much lays it on the line in the language of the testosterone-addled headbangin' horndog:

No girls! Just boys!
Gonna throw a sausage party that the men will enjoy!
The sausage man is hard to find
Put your parts on the table and get ready to grind
Put your hand on the crank
If you want a treat
We don't care what you put in it as long as it's meat

Out at the Devil! - by Thomas S. Roche

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