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	HANDSOME BOY MODELING SCHOOL EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

A live gig by Handsome Boy Modeling School is something of an oxymoron. HBMS is an inside joke stretched over two genre-blurring discs, so meta that indie-hop superproducers Dan "The Automator" Nakamura and "Prince" Paul Huston felt the need for a second set of pseudonyms. On their two albums, the elaborate pose fronted a producer’s party that packed track lists with tight-wound hip-hop and croons that owed more to Portishead than to the Bomb Squad. The duo’s assumed identities as smooth operators Nathaniel Merriweather and Chest Rockwell faded before a dazzling parade of cameos, from Del tha Funky Homosapien to John Oates. Given such hot cuts, the producers’ penchant for obscure sit-com namechecks and giggly sexual innuendo was forgivable — even funny — as long as it didn’t interrupt the funk for too long.

Playing the Paradise a week ago Tuesday, however, the dapper deans struggled to move the sold-out crowd. Live guitar, bass, and keyboards provided the fanfare as Nakamura and Huston took the stage, swaggering in matching red-leather jackets and handlebar ’staches — and then the music cut out so they could gab about their penises and the wonders of handsomeness. It set a pattern where overlong stretches of lame patter took the place of HBMS’s elegant musical stylings.

Worse, the compulsive eclecticism of HBMS’s studio recordings proved impossible to re-create on stage, what with the luminaries and curveballs who drove the albums scattered across the globe. Instead, we got a projection screen with bobblehead animations of their favorite guests looking as if they’d escaped from a zombie South Park to lip-synch over flat instrumentation. The producers ended many songs prematurely, preferring instead to bring on horrorcore trouper Mr. Dead (er, "Manfred Winters") for two interminable skits of homophobia and misogyny. HBMS have always mixed a little broad humor in with their sleek music, but this ham-handed audience abuse wouldn’t stand a chance at a local comedy club.

Things picked up with the energetic finale provided by guest Dres, who got the grateful crowd jumping with three breezily storming songs — including "The Choice Is Yours," his 1991 hit with Black Sheep — that built hopes for his duo’s third album. That aside, this gig was a poor showing for the confirmed bachelors of arts — and proof that such dicy extracurricular pursuits are best left off campus and out of sight.