Inventory Singularly obsessed bands

All songwriters have topics they return to again and again, but it takes a special single-mindedness to make every song revolve around just one concept. With the sports-themed band The Baseball Project hitting Chicago tomorrow, The A.V. Club rounds up a set of one-track wonders who keep their focus narrow, whether they're singing about Star Trek, sluggers, or swords.

Television
For most bands, television is anathema to creativity—a pressing reason to skip practice, or the sort of sucking vortex of slack that’s kept Kevin Shields from making another My Bloody Valentine record, for example. But just as some TV viewers cross the line from box-set-owning buffs to fan-fiction writing freaks, there are a few groups that base entire albums on what they’ve TiVoed. Occasionally it’s just a one-off lark, such as when D.C. rapper Wale dropped his Seinfeld-inspired The Mixtape About Nothing, or when actor/playwright Megan Gogerty stirred up some Internet fame by recording I Miss Buffy!, an album of songs, like “Kinda Wish D’Hoffryn Was My Boyfriend,” that even hardcore Whedonites might find a tad nerdy. But more often it’s an all-consuming passion, as with Germany’s Firefly Music Project, which continues to write songs about Whedon’s sci-fi series seven years after it aired its 11th and final episode—or even better, Brooklyn’s “recap-rock” band Previously On Lost, which turned its quirky, catchy summaries of Lost episodes into mainstream media stardom and a gig at ABC.

Animals
Few poetic conceits can spice up an old-fashioned hard-rock bludgeon-down like the ancient majesty of beasts unleashed by a merciless Creator. And nothing calls men's hearts to marvel at their certain doom like the garish squawk of a parrot named Waldo, front-bird of grindcore outfit Hatebeak. Songs like "God Of Empty Nest" and "Feral Parrot" find an unlikely chemistry between avian and dirtball, but Minneapolis punks Awesome Snakes are all about dragging their namesake reptiles down to their own drunken, inarticulate level, singing exclusively about snakes and things they think are awesome (beer, parties, snacks, etc.). "So I made the snake a tape, like I made it like a compilation tape," drummer-yeller Danny Snakes proclaims on "I Want A Snake," presuming to assimilate these lethal creatures among his resin-huffing buddies. 

Sci-Fi
Visions of space travel and dystopian future-scapes ruled by technological overlords of our own creation have inspired everything from the B-movie-sampling interplanetary surf rock of Man Or Astro-Man? to the animatronic punk of Captured By Robots, but some bands take their sci-fi a little more seriously than that. And why not, considering there will always be conventions willing to book groups like Warp 11? The Starfleet uniform-wearing Sacramento band—which traffics in sexed-up, Star Trek-inspired songs like  “Suck My Spock” and “Boldly Go Down On Me”—has been featured in Trekkies 2 and the Comedy Central Roast Of William Shatner, and recently crossed over into mainstream semi-stardom with the new, surprise critical hit, I Don’t Want To Go To Heaven As Long As They Have Vulcans In Hell. Elucidating the sort of late-night self-examination that other nerdy tribute bands—like the Star Wars-themed So Long, Princess, for example—must all go through, Vulcans ends with the self-examining “Yet Another Song About Star Trek,” on which singer Kari Miller ponders, “As I type ‘engage’ on yet another page / I question if I could have been wrong / But then I rhyme ‘boldly go’ with ‘green-skinned ho’ / And I sing yet another song about Star Trek.” For these bands, the obsession long ago became its voyage and its enterprise.

Socioeconomics
Plenty of musicians sing, rap, and scream about money—hating it, wanting it, getting it, keeping it, flaunting it—but some bands are so consumed by the paper chase and the way it divides humanity into warring social strata that they can only approach it under a satirical guise. The worldview of Austin’s The Yuppie Pricks, for example, is stuck like an idling Mercedes in a Bret Easton Ellis ’80s milieu of power-mad stockbrokers and other rich assholes who love throwing coke parties and sneering at the middle class. Boston’s “hard rocque” band The Upper Crust takes a more historical slant on that same snobbishness, dressing like aristocratic fops and pounding out AC/DC-inspired anthems like “Friend Of A Friend Of The Working Class.” On the opposite end of the economic spectrum, you have groups like Austin’s marauding pirate rockers The Jolly Garogers, who claim to have sailed in from the 17th century and to spend all of their offstage leisure time hunting for buried treasure, and Indiana’s deliberately meek and frugal The Electric Amish, who take rock standards from bands like The Beatles and Steppenwolf and recast them from the perspective of devout, farming Mennonites (“Barn To Be Wild,” “I Want To Hoe Your Land”). What all of these bands have in common is commitment to the idea that money (and the lack of it) alters your perspective—and in that sense, they’re a lot more honest than most rich rock stars singing about hard times.

Sports
One of the main points of sports fandom is immersion in the whole face-painted, tailgating, cheesehead-wearing tribal subculture. And so, even though the great jock-vs.-geek divide has been part of American civilization since, oh, at least Revenge Of The Nerds, there are few people out there as truly, happily, geekily obsessive as the stats-happy sports fan. (Remember, for most people, "who led the National League in stolen bases in 1983" has the same answer as "which members of the Enterprise crew served on the ship before Captain Kirk commanded it?": "WHO CARES SHUT UP SHUT UP.") So it's not at all surprising to see hardcore sportos strapping on both guitars and hockey pads in praise of their obsession. New York's Two Man Advantage plays pummeling punk rock in praise of the Pittsburgh Penguins and zambonis, and has been known to kick off shows with a rousing sing-along to "O Canada," which is pretty much hockey's national anthem too. Toronto's Nomeansno pays tribute to the sport's greatest fictional goons as The Hanson Brothers, taking on the personas of the Slap Shot man-children to bellow out rink-based Ramonesian tunes. And although Yo La Tengo takes its name from a story about Mets outfielder Elio Chacon, for sports devotion in alt-rock it's hard to beat The Baseball Project, a supergroup in which Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey, Dream Syndicate's Steve Wynn, and R.E.M.'s Peter Buck unload a vast amount of obscure diamond lore in songs like "Harvey Haddix," whose chorus lists all 17 major-league pitchers credited with no-hitters, and argues that Pittsburgh pitcher Haddix deserves to be among them.

Fantasy
Some things are just ripe for geekdom, and perhaps there is no better example of that than in one of the touchiest topics in all of literature: the fantasy novel. It’s a genre equally reviled and revered, cringe-worthy to its critics and feverishly venerated by its followers. It’s not the authors, or even their works necessarily, that elicit such a grossly polarized reaction—no, mostly it’s the ultra-fans and their obsessive self-immersion that makes fantasy feel like a dirty word. The world of J.R.R. Tolkien, for instance, has inspired more than just evil-sounding band names (Cirith Ungol, Gorgoroth, Amon Amarth) and epic lyrical homage. (Led Zep has a number of Middle-Earth-centered songs.) It’s also spawned Christopher Lee-approved The Tolkien Ensemble, which, according to its website, is a “complete musical interpretation” of all things Tolkien. Boy wizards and abstinent vamps are prime also for musical tribute: Just ask Harry And The Potters or The Bella Cullen Project.

Video Games
Long before nerdcore became an acceptable genre tag, video gamers were once considered the lamest of the lame, the antithesis of a rock star. Not anymore. Recently, there's been an insurgency of gamers putting down their controllers, picking up guitars, and singing about their favorite games. The Protomen are at the precipice of this niche: The Murfreesboro, Tenn. collective casts the beloved Mega Man series as a legitimate space-rock opera, focusing on the Blue Bomber's earlier games. Naturally, its members all presume code names and wear impressive costumes that display as much attention to detail as their songs. Though they aren't above taking creative liberties with Mega Man's core story, they're also doggedly dedicated to writing about the Dr. Wily (the bad guy) and the Dr. Light (the good guy who builds Mega Man). The group isn't a one-trick pony, either: It just released sophomore album, Act II: The Father Of Death, which serves as a prequel to its self-titled debut. That may be a bit too intense for some people, which is why bands like The Advantage and The Minibosses opt for simple, faithful, and rocking versions of the Super Mario Bros. themes and music from other popular games, but some purists (including The Protomen) sneer and call them cover bands. It just depends how nerdy you want to get as a fan.