Album Review: Honchie’s International World Champions of Rock Music

by Todd Maternowski

Honchie's International World Champions of Rock Music rocks so hard unsuspecting listeners may require urgent medical attention. This album kicks ass and takes names, then takes those names and kicks their ass. Honchie is one band that knows ass isn't going to kick itself, and has created a second album so Hasselhoffian, it ranks someplace on the Scales of Cool between being captain of a chocolate milk-dispensing pirate ship, and having Yoda as your dad.

Honchie is a band that knows the definition of rock: "rock1 [rok] verb to (cause to) swing gently backwards and forwards or from side to side. Example: The mother rocked the cradle; This cradle rocks." With this album, Honchie doesn't just melt face: it's more like a gorilla dressed like David Lee Roth is shoving a chainsaw down your throat. For example, track #1 "Please Leave My Yard" is awesome. Really awesome. More awesome than a sarlaac pit covered in dinosaur stickers. Or take "Inside": in a world where so-called "rock" singers sound like constipated people screaming from the toilet, lead singer/bassist/charm factory triple threat Doug Krause takes this romantic ballad and deftly delivers a hypersexual headbutt. Like Mr. T, Honchie ain't playin'.

Where was Honchie when they wrote "No Exit" and "The Brothers Karamazov?" This album beats the crap out of those novels even before they get to "Herpes Holiday." Track #4, "Oh Thank God For the Woman" is a love song smoother than an diaherretic ogre trapped in a port-o-potty; and "Three Gay Sailors" is so powerful it could bring a boisterous Irish pub to hilariously awkward and uncomfortable silence. Track after track, this album pounds face like the Hammer of Thor until the final track, "Totally Awesome," a song that rocks with such seriousness you'd think the members of Honchie were the last survivors of a top-secret rock team, and if they fail in their last mission, the godless communists win.

This album is ten times as good as anything I can put into words. So it's ten times better than these words: "This album is the rock equivalent of being on a bed with dozens of Natalie Portman clones wearing thousand-dollar bills as lingerie, and will probably break the CD changer in your truck." Like every album that isn't this album proves, nothing's perfect: be warned that the human funny-bone can only take four or five listenings before it fractures from compound hilarity. The world is their rock highway, and these hot dogs need to ride.