Lawrence’s the Sluts make sleazy music to drink to

Kristoffer Dover and Ryan Wise speedily crush Miller Lite tallboys at the Jackpot Saloon in Lawrence. Side by side, they make an odd couple. Dover, with a Beatles-like moppy haircut, looks like he could be on his way to a frat party; Wise, a bespectacled, shaggy blond, seems vaguely bookish.

Wise is content to let Dover lead the discussion about their band, the Sluts. But Dover, a quick-witted charmer with a sharpness that suggests his self-deprecating humor pulled him through a lot of childhood unpleasantness, calls Wise the true brain behind the duo.

The Sluts came together three years ago, after guitarist Wise finally convinced Dover, a longtime friend and fellow native of Carl Junction, Missouri, to join him and play drums. Dover says the decision was owed to a lack in Lawrence of “music to drink to” and a few too many drinks. He can trace the exact moment back to the Jackpot.

“We came here — the Jackpot, but it was different owners — four years ago,” Dover says. “And there were these two dudes, dressed in witch costumes, playing two little Casio keyboards, like my sister had back in 1989, and mumbling some bullshit, and it was just terrible. And I remember being broke and just being like, ‘Fine, let’s make a fucking band. We have to.’ “

At that point, Dover hadn’t touched a drum kit in eight years, not since his post-high-school, jazz-band days. (“I was terrible,” he admits.) Wise had been playing around town as a fill-in guitarist with various bands. Neither had any solid musical projects attached to his name. But Dover and Wise were getting burnt out on local music, and they saw a void that needed filling.

“If you lived in Lawrence for the last 10 years, all you’d be able to find was a bunch of crunchy, hippie bluegrass and death metal,” Dover says. “There was nobody singing and playing guitars with a hook. It was driving me crazy.”

Wise adds: “We felt like there was a lot lacking from the local scene as far as grunge rock. Like, garage rock definitely had a scene here, but we just wanted to do something more direct: pop-influenced grunge.”

In November, the Sluts released Virile, a full-length debut that couldn’t sound more like the essence of the 1990s if you listened to it on your Walkman while rebooting Windows and snacking on Dunkaroos. Virile‘s nine songs rush out of the gate and bang around with pent-up frustration, only one of them making it past the three-minute mark. The songs are built around the hooks that Dover and Wise hold dear.

Quiet, mild-mannered Wise becomes a lead singer from hell with his melodic yelling. On “Die,” he sounds grimy and tormented as he throatily rages against a girl who scorned him.

“Every single one of the songs on this record is based on some shit that happened to either me or him,” Dover says.

It’s not that so much shit has happened to Dover and Wise but rather that Wise, who writes the lyrics, has a way of throwing a delightfully unsavory spin on his experiences. On “Friends,” Wise rails against acquaintances who have abandoned debauchery for enlightened paths. (Dover calls these one-time pals “automatons who are not themselves anymore.”) On “Misdemeanor,” Wise refers to being “fucked up,” picked up by the police and spending a night in jail: Hey, Pop, can you bail me out? I need to take a piss.

“We’re not out to play bat mitzvahs or eighth-grade dances,” Dover says.

While it’s unlikely that a middle-school teacher would ever consider the Sluts for a winter formal, Dover and Wise are onto something with Virile. The boys are like unholy messiahs of our most sordid, private desires, saying what we wish we could say. And they do it loudly. What’s more, they do it in a way that makes you want to hit the Repeat button.

“We were interested in playing simply, not embellishing too much,” Wise says. “I felt like there was a lot of busy jam music going on, and I was sick of hearing it. I wanted to do something that was fun and dumb and had distorted guitars and a fuzzy vocal and no showing off, necessarily. We have no frills, no flash.”

Dover adds: “Our whole thing is trying to capture something that’s awesome and then not fuck it up by overdoing it.”

I ask Dover and Wise if they are aware of what the most immediate Google hit is upon trying to look them up on the Web.

“Pornography,” Wise says.

“Awesome shit, awesome, awesome shit,” Dover adds. “I think it’s awesome that anyone who has ever bothered to try to look us up has probably gotten the treat of a little porn before they found us.”

Wise agrees: “Our music is pretty seedy, so if you have to sift through a bunch of seedy websites to find ours, then that’s cool. I can deal with that.”