THE WEIRD LOVEMAKERS, who describe themselves as "one of the area's best-loved lame four-chord bands," have been receiving fan mail. "Take this! And this!" drummer Gerard Schumacher insists, seized by the desire to bestow a pile of junk mail on a visiting reporter. "Dear Mr. Shoemaker," the first letter begins, "You are a really fun teacher. What kind of cake did you have on your fifth birthday? Thank you for letting me use the bathroom." Schumacher, a blond, surfer-faced Australian, describes the pressures inherent in being a grade school teacher and a punk rocker. "My students think I'm weird. Most of them think I'm gay because I came to class twice with my fly down. I had this pair of pants with a faulty fly. That's how their brains work." It's this kind of sporting willingness to shame, expose and ridicule themselves to the press, along with a dose of free-floating intelligence, that makes the Weird Lovemakers stand out as lovable underdogs in the world of lame, four-chord punk rock bands. The Lovemakers combine a nerdy, comic-book belief in their own inadequacy with a love of driving pop to forge the answer to the burning question: What would happen if you crossed The Vibrators and Kiss? What happens is big, manly chords nuzzled up to perky little hooks that can start the most disaffected wall-huggers dancing. I have seen The Weird Lovemakers turn a room full of people happy with bizarrely infectious songs like "Vegemite," of which the complete lyrics follow: "You're eating vegemite, you never get the peanut butter. You're eating vegemite, you sorry little motherfucker." "Vegemite," along with 28 other songs, appears on the Lovemakers' newly released CD, their first, entitled Electric Chump. "It's the fulfillment of a life-long dream to put out a real CD," guitarist Jason Willis says. "And we did it the way we wanted to," Shumacher says, "with a full-color cover, a lyric sheet and everything." "We had a chance to play around in the studio," Willis adds, "and put in weird stuff like backwards guitar." The songs on Electric Chump are catchy, speedy (with a little Norteño twitter thrown in here and there) and notably short, distilling the best elements of post-seventies punk into compact, dense little packages. The band claims the longest song they've ever written is three minutes. "Sometimes," says guitarist and frontman Greg Petix, "I'll be in the middle of a song and I feel like we've been playing forever but then I realize the whole song is only a minute and a half long." Fellow frontman and bassist Hector Jaime elaborates: "Bad songwriters add unnecessary parts to their songs that don't fit in. A lot of rock songs will repeat the chorus something like five times." Somehow though, the band manages to shoehorn a fine lot of angst into such small packages. The Weird Lovemakers sing songs about the humiliation of being a telemarketer, of having no friends, of the terrible elves and then, of course, there are the many songs dealing with a pet subject of Petix: the war between the beautiful and the ugly. "Everyone knows deep down that the war is going on," says Petix, whose liquid blue eyes and burly frame suggest elements of both a supermodel and a schlep. "People say looks don't matter as long as you're a good person, but they know in their hearts that's bullshit." The war is plotted in songs like Captain Ugly, the musical chronicle of a superhero who travels the land disfiguring comely folk so they'll learn that deep inside, we're all the same. This fascination with ugliness is all the more strange because one of the band's abiding characteristics, as a group, is an overwhelming sense of adorableness. They lack any trace of rock-star, hipster pretension and come across instead as a group of overgrown cub scouts eager to put on a neato show in the backyard. When asked for their most exciting, wild, punk rock story, the bandmates go blank for a minute, then come to agreement: the story of the bee. "I was driving the van without a shirt on because it was hot," says Jaime (who is, according to the other Lovemakers, The Cute One), "and a bee flew in the window and stung me on the chest." All the other guys listen intently, like this is a really good story. "So I put my shirt on, but then another bee flies in the window and stings me on the leg." No stalker fans, trashed hotel rooms or drug-inspired Heimlich maneuvers for this bunch. Thrills come to The Weird Lovemakers on the wings of tiny insects. One question remains: Are they weird? Judge for yourself. When asked, "What's the dumbest thing you've ever eaten?" Petix replies: "I didn't really eat it, but I was smoking and eating ice cream, and I noticed I'd flicked an ash right into my bowl. I just stared at it for the longest time."

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