#19: There will be no fireworks
Purple Witch of Culver, Bite Me Bambi, Aliensdontringdoorbells, No Love for the Middle Child
Hey, it’s 2021. Everything’s fixed!
Purple Witch of Culver
This new duo of saxophonist/poet Sarah Safaie and multi-instrumentalist/producer Evan Taylor explores “a diverse cross section of music and poetry,” per their Bandcamp. If a group has a poet-saxophonist, you won’t be surprised when they release, say, a seven-minute song called “Eulogy for a Sunbeam.” Nor will you be surprised that said poet-saxophonist drops stream-of-conscious poetry over the music, like “Fossil fuel capitalism is violent policing,” or “When I’m eco-dictator, there will be no fireworks.” (Safaie’s Instragram bio: “ECOSOCIALISM / BARITONE SAX + multi-winds.”) These sentiments are all to be expected, if not entirely understood. None is more telling than this line from “Trig”: “We, ambassadors of the edge, accompany each other’s dissonance.” Because anyone playing such esoteric music would definitely consider themselves “ambassadors of the edge.” That should be Purple Witch of Culver’s bio on all social media, perhaps appended with “Not a parody act”—because I would’ve presumed anyone titling a song “Eulogy for a Sunbeam” was joking.
Bite Me Bambi
You can say a lot of things about ska. This is not one of them:
a genre that may have originated in Jamaica, and honed in Britain, but was perfected in the haze, blight, glamour, and beauty of Southern California.
That’s the very last line of a press release for Bite Me Bambi, a ska band from Orange County. Most people don’t read to the end of these things, and with good reason—they seldom warrant more than a skim. But sometimes you’re rewarded with hilarity. Reading that line, I imagined legendary producer Coxsone Dodd recording Toots and the Maytals at his studio in Kingston and saying, “Yeah, that’s good, but just wait till people in Orange County get a hold of this.”
People like former members of Save Ferris, My Superhero, and Starpool, who currently play in Bite Me Bambi. According to vocalist Tahlena Chikami, the name comes from a line in 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats, a movie a lot of people insist is great. Chikami is one of them: “I saw that when I was a kid, and it was the movie that made me want to be a musician and be in a band.” Lucky for her, she lived in the place that perfected ska!
Aliensdontringdoorbells
Would anyone seeing this name expect the band to play ’80s-style pop-rock à la Paul Young? Or a Creed-esque music video with sweeping shots of the band earnestly playing on a hilltop? No? Well, guess what?
Having seen a couple Aliensdontringdoorbells videos, I wasn’t surprised to see they have a super long bio—1,200+ words!—because I’ve developed that useless sixth sense while writing about bands for 25 years. There’s something about being ultra earnest that compels unknown bands to go on and on and on about themselves. At least Aliensdontringdoorbells address the name before going deep into each member’s biography:
The band took their outlandish name from a conversation [guitarist Dorian] Foyil recalled witnessing between an old man and Foyil’s (then) six year old son on a New York subway platform a number of years ago: the old man appeared to be talking to himself until he turned to the boy and said, “it’s because aliens don’t ring doorbells.”
Only in New York, am I right? Fuhgetaboutit! Let’s get a slice! ’ey, I’m walkin’ here! Etc.
In that lengthy bio, the band awkwardly describes itself as “Adult Pop Rock with a raw edge. Or Simon and Garfunkels’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters [sic] meets .. Alien!” If you watched any of the above video, you understand there’s nothing remotely edgy about Aliensdontringdoorbells.
No Love for the Middle Child
Readers who got into Zero 9:36 after BNB #9—hey, it’s possible—would’ve come across “Come Thru,” a No Love for the Middle Child song featuring Zero. The really eagle-eyed folks may know that No Love produced or performed on tracks from Zero’s You Will Not Be Saved. But chances are no one checks either of those boxes. Here’s the world’s shortest Behind the Music: Zero 9:36 and No Love for the Middle Child share a manager, so that’s how it happened. FASCINATING!
The moniker is recent, but the man behind No Love for the Middle Child, Andrew Franklin, has kicked around the production world for a few years. Most notably, he worked on Meek Mill’s “Intro,” the Phil Collins-sampling track from 2018’s Championships, and earned a gold record for his efforts. The whole process of making beats for a huge artist like Meek Mill is pretty interesting—and a little depressing—as described by No Love on this podcast interview (around the 11-minute mark). Franklin actually wrote the melody, not the actual beat, which was added by someone later. It all sounds very surgical and inhuman, but “surgical and inhuman” pretty well captures pop music in general.
While nearly as polished as anything on commercial radio, No Love for the Middle Child’s music feels human, because computers tend to be less emo. It runs the gamut between surprisingly guitar-centric to synthy pop, all of it pretty catchy.
Beyond that, there isn’t much to say about No Love for the Middle Child, other than its name helps a million mopey middle kids finally feel seen.
POST-SCRIPTS
Maybe there is something to this “SoCal perfected ska” thing:
Some of my favorite albums of 2020, in no order: Worriers, You or Someone You Know; METZ, Atlas Vending; Bob Mould, Blue Hearts; A. Swayze & the Ghosts, Paid Salvation. Even when I had to make year-end lists as part of my job, I was bad at it.
I may take the next month or so off from BNB to write a chapter for a book pitch. So if you don’t see something the first week in February (or mid-January for paying subscribers), that’s the deal.
Happy new year. Wear a goddamn mask.
