Naked Launch

"They're all such smart, witty guys that to actually follow them and shoot all the crazy stuff that goes on would be fantastic," says Priestley, who hopes to shoot a feature-length rockumentary of the band this fall.

The group's rise has also been helped by its extremely ambitious concert schedule (Page estimates that since '92, Barenaked Ladies have spent eight months each year on the road). "They [built a fan base] through touring," says Wayne Isaak, senior vice president of music and talent at VH1. "Right now they're like the Dave Matthews Band was a couple of years ago."

The band's label, Reprise, firmly believed that Stunt, the Ladies' fifth CD, would be a breakthrough album. Even so, label president Howie Klein admits that he was surprised by the disc's first-week sales. "I figured we'd sell around 100,000 and come in at No. 6 [on the Billboard charts]," he says. "Instead, we sold 142,000 and came in at No. 3."

Stunt is being touted as the Ladies' watershed, a seamless collection of well-crafted folk-pop that showcases their witty lyrics and gentle humor. The soon-to-be-inescapable "One Week" grafts a wacky rap from Robertson onto a tuneful rumination about a lovers' quarrel, cannily distilling XTC, SCTV, and Run-DMC into a shiny, radio-friendly tidbit that deftly drops pop-culture references ("Watchin' X-Files with no lights on...I hope the Smoking Man's in this one"). Robertson concedes that the song might strike some as a novelty, but bristles at applying that tag to the band: "You'd be hard-pressed to listen to any one of our records and then call us a novelty act."

Novelty or not, VH1 and MTV have already put the video for "One Week" in heavy rotation. But if tastemakers and the public have fallen for the Ladies' charms, some critics continue to treat the clean-cut cutups with all the contempt they would accord a Barry Manilow wannabe. ("As cute as a baby and as appealing as a loaded diaper" is one of the more pungent put-downs to be lobbed at the band.) Page is philosophical about bad press: "I care [about negative reviews], but we make music first of all for ourselves, and secondly for whoever wants to hear it."

And plenty of people seem to want to hear Barenaked Ladies' music. If audience response is any gauge, the band handily blew away fellow headliners Blues Traveler and Paula Cole at the Columbus H.O.R.D.E. date, winning the crowd over with a sharply paced, well-oiled set that included jokey fan faves like "Brian Wilson" and "If I Had $1,000,000." Page and Robertson demonstrated their considerable skills at freestyling during several seemingly improvised segments (at one point, Page tossed off an extemporaneous rap in which he referred to a pair of "big breasts"—his own—at that day's pool party), proving that while they may not be the Beastie Boys, they're comfortably conversant in Caucasian hip-hop patois. The climax—a tongue-in-cheek medley that included bits of Biz Markie's "Just a Friend," the Spice Girls' "Spice Up Your Life," and Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," complete with a choreographed dance routine—nearly brought the house down. "Man," one teenage listener commented moments after the Ladies left the stage, "I didn't know they'd be that good." Looks like these goofy, pop-happy Canucks may turn out to be as sexy as their name after all.