Death By Stereo
The week's most notable band name
As Decider reminded everyone last week, bands love swiping their names from movies. At first, the phenomenon was pretty much restricted to taking the title of a film and sticking in on your band; everyone from They Might Be Giants to My Bloody Valentine got away with it. At some point, though, groups got a bit more subtle and started lifting lines of dialogue or other specific movie references to recycle: Duran Duran (from Barbarella), The Dismemberment Plan (from Groundhog Day), even Death Cab For Cutie (from Magical Mystery Tour). California’s Death By Stereo—which plays tonight at the Marquis Theater—falls into the latter category. The band takes its name from one of the best scenes of ’80s teen-horror flick The Lost Boys. In it, Cory Haim shoots a vampire through the heart with an arrow, pinning him to a stereo—which fries the bad guy to the tune of a really crappy song called “Good Times” (by INXS, led for the occasion by Australian pub-rocker Jimmy Barnes). Haim’s reaction to the flesh-crackling carnage? “Death by stereo!”
The quote isn’t an obscure reference by any means, but the guys in Death By Stereo gets props for their taste in awesome ’80s movies. And the band’s music is actually just as fun and cartoonishly brutal as the film that inspired its name: For over ten years, DBS has weathered a dozen crappy trends in punk rock by sticking to melodic, heart-on-its-sleeve metalcore. If only poor old Haim had had the same longevity.
Death By Stereo, "Entombed We Collide"
