#117: A star in the Ontario market
Bev Rage & the Drinks; Crippling Alcoholism; Drunken Prayer; the Taste of Vomit; Styrofoam Winos; Wine Lips; Vodka Breadbowl
It’s March in Chicago—and, well, everywhere—which means St. Patrick’s Day, a sacred time for the city’s many power-drinkers. They start drinking early—last year my twentysomething neighbors were playing beer pong outside by 10am—with the odds of puking on the sidewalk and/or getting in a fistfight rising steadily with each passing hour. This Band Name Bureau goes out to them.
Bev Rage & the Drinks
A lot of what I call “Such and Such & the So and Sos” names are just jokes, not actually based on the frontman: Pontius Pilate & the Naildrivers, Lyin’ Bitch & the Restraining Orders, Mel Gibson & the Pants, Marvin Berry & the New Sound, etc. Not so with this Chicago punk band, whose singer-guitarist is a larger-than-life drag queen named Bev Rage.
Granted, “larger than life” and “drag queen” are redundant, but Bev stands a good 7 feet tall in her full drag regalia. The group’s music started out campier—like “Wrap Your Legs (Around My Heart)”—but then Trump got elected, and ::waves arms:: As Bev told the Chicago Reader:
This band is my passion project, and I feel like there are people who really need something like this: to see an unapologetically queer drag queen screaming about politics and the danger of religion and how queer joy is really needed in a music industry that is inherently straight. I’ve tried to balance being very political with having a lighthearted approach and making accessible music that anyone can enjoy.
Too many people can probably relate to “I’m Having a Tryst With a Narcissist.”
Crippling Alcoholism
During my tenure at The A.V. Club, I pitched an Inventory tied to St. Patrick’s Day around depressing depictions of Irish life, because I’m a fun person. Crippling Alcoholism shares that spirit, because the name comes from the experience of singer Tony Castrati. He formed the group in 2022 “in the aftermath of a particularly destructive episode of alcoholism,” according to their bio.
The name is not metaphor or provocation but a plain statement of origin, marking sobriety not as redemption, but as an ongoing confrontation with damage already done. The project emerged as a way to externalize that experience without sanitizing it, allowing shame, desire, and self destruction to remain visible rather than resolved.
So…who’s ready to party for St. Patty’s, bros?! River Shannon opens at 9am, so I figure we get there by 8:45 at the late—wait, there’s more?
Yup. The group’s latest, Camgirl, is a concept album about “a sex worker moving through cycles of exploitation and endurance,” and it’s inspired by the experiences of someone Castrati knows. Yup, it’s bleak, but it’s also surprisingly catchy…dark wave? I don’t know how to classify it. That’s typical, according to Castrati. “A lot of industry people will hear our music and ask ‘What the fuck genre even is this shit?’” Quibbling about genre is easier than sitting with the themes of the music, that’s for sure.
Drunken Prayer
When a band calls itself Drunken Prayer, the influence of Tom Waits is not surprising. While Drunken Prayer doesn’t play “jazzbo carny music for lonely boys,” as John Hodgman memorably described Waits’ style in Medallion Status, you could say Waits set the whole project in motion. Morgan Geer, a.k.a. Drunken Prayer, met him by chance at a book store. As Geer told Willamette Week:
“I was at a real crossroads,” he says. “I was out of the creative rut I was in, but once you get out of the safety zone of that rut, it’s like, well, now what do you do? I talked to him, and he was like, ‘Well, everything. Don’t put a fence around that property.’”
So Geer did a very Waitsian thing and moved to Portland, Oregon, and started performing at a biker bar on Sunday mornings. Thus, the name Drunken Prayer.
The theme continues on last year’s Thy Burdens, “an homage to the intense, sublime music of the church that means so much to the musicians who worked on it.” Geer and collaborator Bobby Matt Patton of the Drive-By Truckers grew up in Southern churches, though Waits has his fingerprints here too: He recommended a gospel album to Geer when they met.
The Taste of Vomit
When you read this name, did you think, “Weird emo kid rap from the planet Earth”? Of course not, but that’s their Bandcamp bio. This Instagram makes a better case.
Said weird emo kid hails from the Philadelphia part of Earth, an area with a deep hip-hop history and fairly straightforward names: Schoolly D. The Roots. Meek Mill. Lil Uzi Vert. Beanie Sigel. The Taste of Vomit certainly sticks out as a moniker. Take last fall’s A Spark of Courage hip-hop and R&B showcase:
The phenomenon carries over to Taste’s prolific discography, which features collabs with artists like Burnt Bakarak, Chill da God, DYLPDX, Charysma, and Juice Got Me Juicy. (Actually, that last one segues fine.)
So why the Taste of Vomit? On the Forecasted Podcast, Taste said it came from his stint as a graffiti artist.
Because in graffiti culture, often you would pick something with like five letters, so you could have the symmetry of it all. So I picked “vomit,” and then I would like hand-throw “the taste of” on top of it and block out “vomit.” And then I would like draw flowers and stuff in between.
His graffiti history helps explain this T-shirt design:
Taste confesses that the guys he hung around with were way better at graffiti, so he was demoted to lookout. The name stuck, though.
While the Taste of Vomit is an odd MC name, it works better than his real one, David Bupp III.1 Ordinal numbers in names always sound fancy to me. I like to imagine the elder David Buppses tsk-tsking about what’s to be done with young David III.
“The Taste of Vomit! That’s what he calls himself!” one of them says. The other, sipping a tumbler of scotch, pensively stares out the window at dusk settling over Philadelphia. “It’s not even a worthy goregrind name.”
Styrofoam Winos
You can be damn sure Bupp I and Bupp II would never drink wine from styrofoam cups. No discerning oenophile would, but we’re talking about winos here. For them, it’s all about cheap, fortified wine from cheap containers—preferably MD 20/202—because sobriety must be subjugated.
Despite the name, I can’t find any information about the booze preferences of Nashville’s Styrofoam Winos. What I did learn is that members Trevor Nikrant, Lou Turner, and Joe Kenkel are solo artists in their own right and used to perform in each other’s backing bands. As Kenkel told WNXP:
There were shows that each of us played that were billed as our first name “and Styrofoam Winos,” and then eventually became more fun to just play songs that belonged to all of us as a group and to write together as well.
But why Styrofoam Winos in the first place? Maybe they just like the flavor of styrene leaching into their wine. Mmm, I can really taste the hormone disruption.
Wine Lips
Winos obviously have wine lips, especially if they’re taking down the neon-rainbow spectrum of MD 20/20. It seems the members of this Toronto garage-punk outfit have slightly classier taste. In an interview with the UK’s Clash Magazine that must’ve taken minutes to prepare, drummer Aurora Evans reminisced about drinking something called Bodacious Smooth Red in the band’s early days.
“This bottle of wine that was under $10 and truly brought the definition of ‘Wine Lips’ to the surface,” she said, noting it was “an inspiration as to how we started.”
One website raves Bodacious Smooth Red is “a star in the Ontario market,” which is like a band claiming they’re huge in Serbia. Some reviewers aren’t as enthusiastic: “It’s not even good as a cooking wine.” “So far the worst wine I ever had.” “I might buy this wine again if there were absolutely no other options available.” But 16 million Ontario residents can’t be wrong!
Vodka Breadbowl
A vodka bread bowl sounds like one of those rage-bait TikToks where someone makes a bunch of disgusting food on purpose. I picture them dumping a fifth of vodka in a hollowed-out sourdough loaf, then putting a bunch of tuna on it or something and pretending it’s delicious.
Bad taste applies to the origin of this name, as singer-guitarist Julia Batz described on the Friday Night on the Air podcast back in 2020: “We wanted to start a punk band, and we wanted the most cursed band name possible. So Vodka Breadbowl happened.”
We here at Band Name Bureau HQ could list so many monikers far more cursed than Vodka Breadbowl, but I appreciate her intent. The name works better in this 2013 joke from comedian Chad Opitz, a screenshot of which became Vodka Breadbowl’s first Instagram post.
Regardless, the LA quartet self-describes as “if an indie coming of age movie gained sentience and started making music,” which in turn sounds like a Suno prompt.
POST-SCRIPTS
I’m adding “Don’t put a fence around that property” to my go-to phrases. Speaking of Tom Waits, this killed me:
Hello Janus Name Journeys readers! I don’t have a Ph.D. like Hannah Emery, but I do have a doctorate in ::checks notes:: cold rockin’ it.
Next month: Our annual dispatch from music festival season. I’ve got 40+ festival lineups to go through before then.
Echoes of Robert Van Winkle, a.k.a. Vanilla Ice.
The tagline on MD 20/20’s website: ICONIC FLAVORS. MAXIMUM IMPACT. Subtle! May I recommend this subhead: HEY HIGH SCHOOLERS, THIS SHIT WILL FUCK YOU UP GOOD, THEN GIVE YOU A HANGOVER THAT’LL MAKE YOU PRAY FOR DEATH.