It's simple to trace the white fingerprints on funk. Long, silly words ending in "fus" or "pus" and shoulder-length, curly hair signal white funk. !!! avoid raising these flags but inevitably fall into the same sad traps and dead ends of virtually every young white musician with a funk streak. In addition to their apparent quest to frustrate search engines and word-of-mouth channels with their unpronouncable name, !!! (technically pronouced with three clicks of the tongue) pay homage to long forgotten Sub Pop bottom-dwellers Big Chief, a band who believed their hometown of Ann Arbor's proximity to Motown warranted a indie hardcore/funk revolution. And like Big Chief, !!! come from a hardcore background, as their label, San Diego hardcore mainstay GSL, implies. Also like Big Chief, !!! will make one yearn for the halcyon days of white funk like "True Men Don't Kill Coyotes."

!!! toss around funk stereotypes-- horns, slap bass and high-hat riding-- but replace the ubiquitous wah-wah with the kind of tick-tock guitar-playing every Fugazi disciple strives for. Brilliant. It's like making Pillsbury Confetti Cupcakes with aquarium gravel. Frank Black achieved greater success in the field with his cover of James Brown's "Mother Popcorn."

There's an air of the increasingly popular "mysterious ensemble" aroused, a la Godspeed You Black Emperor!, what with the silly name and lengthy, building passages. In small spurts, when washes of guitar and treated percussion mount like in "KooKooKa Fuk-U" or when the music borders on electronic in "There's No Fucking Rules, Dude," Emphatic Ellipsis (as I like to call them) nearly achieve something of interest. Unfortunately, any potential is brutally slaughtered by thin production, a horn section modeled after Cake, and one of the worst singers in recorded history.

!!!'s frontman calls himself "Nic," and warbles retarded Prince-isms like, "I believe in U and U make me proud/ If it's 2 high, go low, and if it's 2 fast, go slow" ("The Step") and "Can U feel it intensify/ Can U feel it grow from deep inside" ("Intensify"). Really, I can't. Unless he's refering to hate. And this is the root of the white funk problem. The music is built on preconceptions and tired slogans that suggest insincerity and general stupidity. Ask yourself what would really make a Caucasian coo, "It don't hurt 2 dance so shake your ass" in the year 2001? It's a frustrating question that "intensifies" with each "Uh!" To the children of MTV, funk is just wacky dance music played by fellows with puffy hair and bellbottoms. That !!! yearn to recontextualize this for the punk underground belies whatever noble notions the genre's progenitors began with. The misappropriation of funk for the sake of irony merely kicks a few more white feet into the corpse of Sly Stone.

The likely scenario is that !!! throw a hot live show with pelvic thrusts and silly dancing, which artistic Californian college kids found to be a lighthearted reprieve from stationary headbobbing. In a deperate attempt to seem well-rounded, one of them then suggests that !!! are subversive and brilliant for bringing populist concepts such as "partying" and "dancing" to art. Next thing you know, !!! get a mention in Spin as one of the "next big things." And now I have to play town crier and warn you that when you're playing with white funk, you're going to get songs like "My Name is Pimp" off albums like Mack Avenue Skull Game. Run to the churches!

-Brent DiCrescenzo