With the rise of simply monikered bands like Yuck, The Weeknd, Real Estate, Blouse, Corridor, Cave, and others, perhaps the world has never needed more bizarrely—or at least memorably—named groups. Who’s going to remember a name like Girls when Vomit Erection is out there? Yes, the lyrics to the latter’s “Warm Diarrhoea [sic] Blasts On My Face” are objectionable and the music nonsensical, but godammit, it’s a name you won’t forget. The A.V. Club sees thousands of band names every year, and we don’t notice most of them. We keep a list of the ones we do notice, either because they’re funny, bad, cheesy, so mundane they’re transcendent, or otherwise memorable. Here’s 2011’s bumper crop.
Winner, Most Overwrought Band Bio. A sample: “We open a door to sadness. Sadness is a magnifying glass when used with courage. Open yourself up to it; invite sadness in when it waits on your doorstep, always eager and ready. On the doorstep of your mental house, in which you spend all your life, locked away from everything else; in your House behind the eyes. Our notes and lyrics will make you open the door, and your dogs in the cellar will cease their barking and your demons will hold their breath, just for a little while.”
Song titles from the band’s eponymous debut full-length: “Back To The Fuck Yeah,” “I Punched A Lion In The Throat,” “I’ve Got Guestlist To Rory O’Hara’s Suicide,” “Moonlit Talons”
Their song names were apparently taken from The Big Book Of Hardcore Song Titles: “Scapegoat,” “Still Alive, Hands Untied,” “Virtue Never Tested,” “Infection Kills The Carrier.” Double points for “Voice Of A Lion, Heart Of An Asshole.”
The one-woman band moniker of Aly Spaltro, who writes “sprawling, lyric & melody-based songs”—as opposed to others based on what?—about “lost, true & unrequited love, nostalgia, nectarine meat, wolf maulings, plum crumb cake” and a whole lot of other twee things.
All-female Japanese “death punk” band. Their SXSW bio is adorable: “With heavy music that contains a hardcore element Therefore it is acting in melodic music where it doesn’t stay… It is five time habitual practice as for independent project ?PIGGY*STARDUST? by 2008.”
Their website is cliteater.NET. Someone else apparently owns cliteater.com! Song titles include “She-Male Cocksucker Blues” and “For Those About To Eat Clit, We Salute You.” Albums include Clit ’Em All (2003, originally available on Dismemberment Records & Bleeding Hemorrhoid Records); Eat Clit Or Die (2005); Reign In Thongs (split with Suppository, 2006); Scream Bloody Clit (2008); The Great Southern Clitkill (2010)
“The RBC” refers to itself as a “Pleasure band.” “A live, in your face, dub-filled & tripped out experience means we did our job and brought the pleasure,” says singer Andrew in its bio.
You might want to use the qualifier “band” when Googling this one. Lyrics include “I got death on my shoulder / and the girl with the sweetest ass” and “She’s my high-heeled cocaine.” Party! (The band takes its name from the supposed original title to the Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”)
UrbanDictionary (the first Google result) helpfully defines this as “killing someone with your massive man member.” “Song” titles—use the term loosely—include “My Pappy Done Died” and “Croco Gators.”
Bio: “We stand for the human depravity! NO tolerence [sic], in any manner for NOone! Anti-ecological, anti-social, anti-human way of life, that’s what SCAT GORE means.”
Song titles: “Scatalogical [sic] Pig Vomitorium,” “Boiling My Child’s Excrements,” “Crisis Of Rectal Mentality”
From their Facebook wall: “WHY DOES EVERYONE LIKE OUR REFLECTIONS ON POPULAR CULTURE BUT NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THE SHOW’S WE’RE PLAYING where did we go wrong”
First chorus for “Smells Like Milk”: “What the fuck is up? / What the fuck / What the fuck is up? / What the fuck.” Second chorus: “Where the fuck are you guys now?” (Repeat three times.)
Has a page on its site called “The Girls” devoted to shots of cleavage.
Bio: “Consisting of all pro performers, ASB has genuine direction and excellent song writing ability.” “Genuine direction”? They just finished an eight-song CD, Work Sucks, which features, uh, a cover of “Strange Fruit,” the gut-wrenching song about lynching made famous by Billie Holiday.
Songs: “Shut Up The Fuck Up,” “Acknowledge The Rage,” “Thank All You Guy Helpening,” “We’re Excited About Thinking,” “Reptile Dysfunction.” Also, awesome URL: 1994punctuation.com.
It’s an acronym for Washington’s Hottest And Talented. Facebook “activities and interests” include Mary Kay cosmetics, “if God brought you to it, he will bring you through it ❤,” “HATED BY MANY…WANTED BY PLENTY…DISLIKED BY SOME…CONFRONTED BY NONE.”
This Las Vegas band that sounds like a combination of Gym Class Heroes and Limp Bizkit has a messianic streak and a guitarist who wears a mask for some reason (possibly to look like The Crow). They claim to be the progenitors of “urban rock,” which they describe as a combination of “Funk Rock, Alternative Rock music with Soulful Overtones, Hip-Hop Aggression and R&B Melodies.” “They are referred to by some Vegans [People who live in Vegas, not vegetarians. —ed.] as the urban version of Linkin Park.” (Just in case that’s not obvious, “urban” means “black.”) Member names: Pittboss, Novelist, E. Borders, Adam Crow (mask guy), and Trist. Drink it in, everyone:
The band’s bio builds up the band’s debut in Austin this year: “At the start of their set there were 15 people in the bar quietly sipping their Lone Star beers after an uninspired set from, yet another, self-afflicted Emo band sporting girls’ jeans and way too much hairspray. As the Passersby and the sleepy bar patrons got an earful of this new Memphis band, heads turned and many people packed the bar from the street to see the newest and brightest stars in ‘Active Rock.’” SXSW has no record of their ever playing the festival.
Bio: “Laughing Eye Weeping Eye performances are akin to watching a vaudevillian story-teller in a medival [sic] church with gospel singers, gnomes, and goats.” Members Rebecca Schoenecker and Patrick Holbrook are “bandmates in this life and gurus in another.”
The band’s debut, 2012: Countdown To The End “fostered an array of key placements on ABC’s top-rated teen drama Pretty Little Liars as well as MTV’s hits shows.” Wow, key placements! Their bio also says their song “Wake Up Call” “carves a psychological hole in the sun with its penetrating urgency igniting a meteor shower of wattage.” We hope they didn’t pay the person who wrote this too much.
Bio: “We are a hard rocking four piece from Worcester, England, founded in 2010. Subverting genre and avoiding pigeonholes, our pleasure is rocking up and rocking out. Hooks plus balls. Don’t forget the balls, kids.”
Facebook bio: “Prepare to be touched in a Jerry Sandusky kind of way.” Classy! “If you like your hard rock razor sharp with a pounding southern swamp whiskey bend, Haunting the Disconnect is for you and your family (incarcerated or not)!”
Bio: “Music is Television for your soul, It’s animation for your thoughts and air in your lungs when your [sic] otherwise drowning.
It’s poetry with a soundtrack, where each
beat and note provokes something that a paragraph could not otherwise convey and each word is a paradoxical link to one’s own tortured time and place.” Huh?
Where does the song “Of Zombies, Ghandis & Such Very Dirty Laundries” fit in that?
Bio: “This is the straight-up no frills, 4-white-guys-with-guitars, canbeered and duct-taped rock we were all going deaf to before we got into girls. We’re not gonna change shit, neither is your band, everybody come on up front, this is a rock show, you’re welcome.”
Winner, Awesome Song Title: “Never Promise Crazy A Baby”
Song titles: “Ass To Mouth,” “Addicted To Analingus,” “Gonorrhea Breath,” “Vaginoplasty,” “Britney Rears.” Here’s a live performance of “Confessions Of An Anal Whore”:
From a press release: “Aside from having one of the greatest names in history, Skip The Foreplay are simply Satan’s delivery system for music of mass destruction,” offers Epitaph founder and President Brett Gurewitz. Suggested addition for that press release: “…President Brett Gurewitz, who momentarily forgot he plays in one of the most important punk bands ever and thus deserves more dignity than this.”
Bio…?: “In a cellar where anxiety and blind confidence collide, desperate sounds are set to flame. Marshall [sic] law screams out shallow skulls propulsed by human error. Walls of white wash marbled black. This is the freedom as a captive of sin. There’s no future here so let it burn us clean.”
They’re supposedly from New Jersey, but their bio has an ESL quality to it: “The music they create is what some people would call ‘sporadic’. Literally jumping from one thing to the next, these boys put emphasis and subtly [sic] in every song. Their stories touch on personal topics but are told through a variety of metaphors and smilies [sic].”
In case the name didn’t set off your twee alarm: Each person’s bio lists the instruments they play along with stuff like “improvised dance moves,” “great yoga exercises,” “screams of both joy and frustration,” and “hamburgers.”
Chorus to “Fatty Gets A Stylist”: “When fatty gets a stylist / the world’ll gather round / shower him with gratitude and free love / when fatty gets a stylist / you’ll never keep him down / so eat up, eat up, eat up”
“It’s not really about religion so much as a disposition. The span between the flames and the transcendence…” Gotcha. More from the bio: “Zohra Atash’s brainchild, Religious To Damn, is that rarest of jewels—sophisticated gypsy rock and roll that’s tender and aggressive, elegant and raw all in the same melodic burst.” She’s right: Sophisticated gypsy rock is rare.
This hot-chicks-as-cops video for “Holding On”—with lyrics like “There’s another girl to take your place, maybe two or three” and “You made me lie”—is straight out of 1986. They should tour with Pussy Sisster!
Sad story: This “tween goth punk band”—the twin girls are only 6—formed after their mother died, so their “1st generation punk” father thought music would be a good way for them to work through their grief.
Bio: “Hailing from Deathlehem, producer/DJ duo GRVRBBRS have been remixing since 2008. The two met in High School and have since been drawing inspiration from marijuana, skateboarding, classical music and metal.”
Winner, Most Names Dropped In Band Description: “Coeus offers a more modern take on the Progressive Rock genre. How does it sound? Well… uh… imagine… just imagine… if Pink Floyd became a Faith No More cover band… pulled a drum machine out of the trash for percussion… let folks punch Roger Waters in the throat before he started singing… and had an acid-induced Robert Fripp mix it all in his basement.”
Song titles: “Fuck! I’m Richard Marx,” “Tonight We’re Going To Drink Alcohol At A Party We Will Attend To Get Drunk,” “Ballad Of The Intergalactic Hitman Underwear Fetishist,” “Heinz 57 & Cocaine,” “Yellow Vulva”
