Guitar Wolf

Unless you speak fluent Japanese, you'll only understand about 5 percent of what Guitar Wolf's frontman is screaming about -- a garbled spew of vitriol peppered with smatterings of thickly accented English: "Baby! Baby! Fire Joe! Fuck you! Go! Go! Time machine! 1-2-3! Rock 'n' roll! Yeah!" The rest of the Tokyo trio's lyrical grab bag, at least judging from its latest disc, Loverock, translates into random demands to "unlock my blood pump" or "drink until you dream" because "I'm too damn bored/What can I do?/Smoke smoke smoke smoke!" But words hardly matter for a band more concerned with style than substance. Dressed head to foot in jet-black leathers and dark sunglasses, the members of Wolf play the role of kamikaze cycle hoodlums for the sake of vainglory and Sid Vicious. Even so, the Pacific Rim's beloved gutter punks, Seiji, Billy and Toru, can flat-out energize a room into a Pokemon-induced seizure, with a sonic menace that pits Loudness and the Ramones in a knife fight refereed by Joan Jett. It's a simple formula in which no round lasts longer than three minutes -- and has all the subtlety of Godzilla in a china shop.