Bachelor pad

Give singer Sean Pheanis 45 minutes, and he'll likely try and subconsciously convince you of three things: 1. Texas Congressman Ron Paul's rightful presidential win has been thwarted thus far by media (cough, Fox news) exclusion. 2. Songs about underground Republican fraternities are most effective when accompanied by electro-dance beats. 3. Though Pheanis' Geneva-based, hip-swinging electro project Bachelor Party Weekend sounds categorically different than most bands they play with, he prefers it to surrendering to a sound he considers jail bait for pop-punk record labels.

Stay on the phone another 15 and the already industry-tinged rock talk charges full force into music/label discourse. If a meeting hadn't called me away, we'd probably have stayed on the line another hour. "If I wasn't talking to you about music," he says, "I'd be talking to someone else about it."

Pheanis tells me he's known around local circles as a goofy guy. A mess-around-on-stage rocker and fully practicing pizza-not-practice sort of joker whose show antics tend to pay for the price of admission before the music even begins. Maybe he curbed the folly for my sake, but I didn't see it. He's a politically driven musician who recently started a second-BA animation degree in Chicago and whose vocals, I must say, sound strikingly Elvis-like in Bachelor Party Weekend's lip-curling rocker "Mission Man." He's also a part-time conspiracy theorist, I gather, seeing as he penned a song about Bohemian Grove, the site of an elite brotherhood whose membership included both Bushes, Ronald Regan and Richard Nixon.

But then again, Pheanis is known for testing out rock venue compatibility by saying his band's vibe finds closest kinship with the B-52s. So it's not necessarily a surprise that his fans and friends initially thought the progressive synth-rock project he called Bachelor Party Weekend was a farce.

"They probably just figured we'd play at The House (in DeKalb) a few times and fizzle out," he says. "I thought so, too."

Instead, Pheanis and co-founding guitarist/keyboardist/programmer visionary Zak Kleiner (whose brother is the keyboardist for popular screamo-techsters Tub Ring) commissioned Jake Anderson and Dave Stach of Geneva's Surround Sound and, as of November, Mike Sprague from Geneva's indie-signed Mt. St. Helen's. The rock family's lineage, Pheanis is proud to point out, spans generations, from 18-year-old drummer Anderson to late-20-something Sprague.

"All the bands in Geneva are all related," Pheanis says, musing Bachelor Party Weekend's stake in the town's indie-band lore. "We cover like three generations of all the bands in Geneva."

A year into full-on shows quieted any naysayers and turned Pheanis into a dedicated rock partner. The group plans to record at JBTV studios this spring with Tub Ring's Rob Kleiner and hopes to have their introductory disc out by summer. The band also hopes for an appearance on JBTV's Jerry Bryant-led video show (where Pheanis interned one summer), but the market's tough among local up-and-comers. It's tepid times among suburban recording artists, who've seen local heroes Spitalfield and June sign to labels and then disband, and watched others revise so many of its original members that local bands no longer justify their suburban-Chicago geographic cred on MySpace.

"I'd rather be on a do-it-yourself label," Pheanis says.

But now isn't the time to toss their rock dreams, he says. After all, Pheanis has anointed himself part of the scene since the start of puberty. He describes his personal rock biography through band names, the first of which is so steeped in punk-rock adolescence he likely couldn't have made it up if he wanted to.

"Mucus Princess," he laughs. "We were young. We didn't know what was going on in the world, and Mucus Princess seemed to make sense."

Hardcore rock project Toxic Crusaders followed MP during Pheanis' AFI singer Davey Havok phase, and despite his revelations about screaming being merely a teen phase, he became part of Niagara Fall, a scream-o band. King In Queen, Pheanis' last band before Bachelor Party Weekend, actually fell into some local acclaim. One local rock scribe even divined his vocal stylings to those of early Led Zeppelin. Let the record show that Pheanis is not -- nor has he ever been -- a fan of Led Zeppelin. He'd probably much rather prefer comparisons to Oingo Boingo's Danny Elfman. Or Ron Paul, whom the band points to at the top of its MySpace page: "Bachelor Party Weekend supports Ron Paul for GOP."

None of Pheanis' other projects broke the Midwestern barrier, but he feels confident that this one will. He and Zak Kleiner are driving down to the South by Southwest music festival this spring to sell merch and help out with Tub Ring's set, mentally preparing for a hopeful future in Texas the following year.

Sunday: The House Cafe, DeKalb with Tub Ring

8 p.m., $10 at the door