Together, the two dudes who make up Gil Mantera's Party Dream look like a pair of struggling porn stars, or wrestlers gone to seed, or white-trash superheroes who've retired from their duties but continue to wear capes and spandex for nostalgia.

Gil Mantera's lank blond hair hangs over dark aviator shades, he rocks oversized tattoos of diving eagles on both pecs, and his asscrack peeks out from the back of his black bikini briefs. Gil's partner-in-crime Ultimate Donny sports a gold sequined headband over his messy reddish hair, his half-shed black bodysuit hangs inelegantly between his legs, and you can tell by the way he's wriggling that the rest of his getup will soon be peeled away to reveal his favorite leopard-print undies.

Both musicians are furry-faced and well-built in a drinks-while-exercising sort of way, their muscles covered in a soft layer of pasty flesh and discreet beer paunches ready to blossom into full-blown guts. Both dance and prance about the stage with unabashed cheekiness, Gil with generous aerobic hip-gyrating, groin-pumping and arm-waving; Donny drawing from a more primal place with aggressive stomping, jerky swaying and the occasional frenzied hair-pulling.

Gil Mantera's Party Dream takes its performance art to a punk-rock level of absurdity. It's unplanned chaos, unscripted comedy, an unstoppable train wreck of New Wave-inspired electronic synth-pop. Whether or not you find the duo's self-assured near-nakedness sexy or grotesque, it's hard to deny their animal magnetism or to look away from their compelling, alcohol-fueled showmanship. And their music is genuinely good: fun, kitschy-catchy, euphoric and at all times danceable.

When they aren't performing against a recorded backing track, Gil alternates on keys and bass, Donny plays guitar, and they trade off on vocal duties. Donny takes the lead with his wildly emotive wails while Gil provides support through a Vocoder that makes his singing melodically robotic, à la Daft Punk.

It's certainly not standard Warped Tour fare, but that's where GMPD found itself this summer, careening from city to city with the rolling punk festival.

In a review of the fest, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette hit the nail on the head: "It's the kind of sideshow that still makes Warped a must even if it's no longer wall-to-wall punk."

"It was definitely interesting," Ultimate Donny tells me of the Warped Tour experience during a recent phone interview. "Day to day was different. Sometimes we had a crowd that was very accepting. I think mostly people were puzzled, but intrigued nonetheless."

Opening for GWAR a few months before likely prepared them for pretty much anything. "It was interesting in the horrible sense. … mostly, it sucked a lot," Donny says. "GWAR fans are very close-minded when it comes to anything besides metal, especially when it's faggy electronic bands."

Donny says some people seemed to dig it, but, in the end, "It just wasn't worth it. They were just pissed-off shows. We like to have a good time; we don't like to be pissed the entire time we're playing."

Donny says that receptive audiences, small and big, are really what make Party Dream shows work best. "We'll work our asses off to four people if they're into it," he says. "But when we have a packed house and everyone's going nuts, it makes everything so easy." He adds in all seriousness, "Plus, you can really feel cool after the show, too, instead of walking off with your head hung low."

Party Dream has been touring so extensively and continuously since its well-regarded 2006 debut, Bloodsongs, that it hasn't clocked much studio time. But Donny says he and Gil have been writing and performing "mostly new stuff" on the road, adding, "We have more than enough material for a new album right now. We already have three songs recorded for the new album. One is mastered to be released as a single pretty soon."

The duo claims to be brothers based in Youngstown, Ohio, but they're generally tight-lipped when it comes to the rest of the hard facts about their "real life" existence. When discussing the band's early days, Donny recites the backstory everyone knows, the litany of "facts" in every press release and every write-up with any substance: Gil Mantera's Party Dream had its beginnings when a three-man act dubbed "Party Talk" — which included Donny and Gil — got together in 1998 and played a one-off set of retro '80s-style music in Youngstown. Fast-forward to 2001. Donny and Gil had repurposed several of the admittedly horrible Party Talk songs into appealing electro-pop numbers and were performing together under a fresh new moniker, shedding clothes piece by piece throughout each show like they'd been doing it all their lives.

When I shot Donny a follow-up e-mail to clarify his kinship with Gil and to verify their real names and ages (as the info seems to be omitted from every official source except the notoriously unreliable Wikipedia), I was gently denied: "I'd gladly tell all in an informal conversation, but I'm not too comfortable with some of these facts appearing in articles. Too much information can take away from the fantasy, the mystique."

For this tour, the duo is trying out something different — a living, breathing drummer in place of the usual drum track. "We just wanted a change, to make it fun and add another element to the mix," Donny says.

No telling whether or not said drummer will be joining them in their nightly striptease.

This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2008.