#26: This Summer's Sorrow II
Alpha Male Tea Party, Dolphin Midwives, Curse These Metal Hands, Verb the Noun, Wristmeetrazor
Alpha Male Tea Party
What’s it like being a band from Liverpool? I’ve never been to the city, but I wonder if musicians see futility everywhere they go. “Oh you’re starting a band, eh? Maybe you’ve heard the GREATEST ROCK ’N’ ROLL BAND OF ALL TIME was from here? Good luck, mate!” Maybe all that history sends bands in the opposite direction, like, say, instrumental math rock. And maybe those bands give themselves a goofy name and their songs wordy titles like “You Eat Houmous, Of Course You Listen to Genesis,” “God is Love But Satan Does That Thing You Like With His Tongue,” “I Haven’t Had a Lunch Break Since Windows Vista Came Out,” “Reach for the Stars Kid But Don’t Blame Me If It Makes You Miserable” (real!), “Depressingly Shit Lunchtime Sandwich,” and so forth. (I’m partial to the simplicity of “You Are My the Rock” and “Athlete’s Face.”) Alpha Male Tea Party’s 2020 album, Infinity Stare, has a dearth of goofy song titles, because 2020 had to ruin everything.
Dolphin Midwives
I mean, “Dolphin Doula” is right there for the taking. Her Bandcamp bio:
chaos magic moon milk ocean murmur orchid sleeper holy hands interface architecture/lace gravity doesn’t exist change laws of physics ecstasy clarity iridescing irresponsibly microtonal vision vortex portal opening reverberating witch sister who plays harp/voice/noise/electronics and everyday objects
Curse These Metal Hands
Okay, let’s try to parse this one. Curse These Metal Hands is a supergroup composed of all of the members of Conjurer and Pijn. Sort of. An interview in Upset describes it as “neither a band nor a singular album,” with Conjurer vocalist-guitarist explaining:
“We were like, are we Pijn and Conjurer, or are we Curse These Metal Hands? I think we’ve settled with ‘We are Pijn and Conjurer playing Curse These Metal Hands.’”
That’s asking a lot of the listening public. Regardless, the semantics resulted in a 2019 album. If you suspected the songs are at least nine minutes long, you receive partial credit. Track three, “Endeavour,” is a scant 2:21. But you’re right about the other three. Bandcamp user Uncle Daddy raves, “When I threw this on, Uncle Gary ran in and yelled IS THIS THAT BARONESS YOU USED TO LIKE and when I told him it wasn't, he took off his sweatpants and threw them in the fireplace.”
Clicking to Uncle Daddy’s profile reveals a) an avatar of Hank Scorpio wearing Homer’s jacket backward, from the classic Simpsons episode, and b) this person has done this bit for at least six years and dozens of reviews. Like this one, for False’s Portent:
Uncle Gary and I sat down and listened to this whole album together. When it was done, he got up and walked into the garage and I heard his motorcycle start up. When I walked in, he was just staring out the garage door at the sky with tears in his eyes as he whispered “Album of the year...” before he gunned the engine and took off into the distance. He hasn't been heard from since (although that was only an hour ago).
I would be shocked if this guy weren’t A.V. Club commenter back in the day.
Verb the Noun
There’s a whole subgenre of monikers that follow this naming scheme, so much so that Billboard did a story in 2016 where it asked readers to guess which names were real and which were fake. It also asked readers to endure browser-choking ads, autoplaying video, and a bunch of unrelated clutter to the point where the quiz itself didn’t even load for me. (Man, things are dire out there.) Anyway, at least a couple different bands claim this name. One has the bio “We’re Verb the Noun and we just stopped sucking yesterday,” and hasn’t been active for about six years. The other is a progressive-metal quintet from Birmingham, UK, with a very pointy logo.
Wristmeetrazor
You get a press release for a band with this melodramatic name—made more histrionic by removing the spaces between words—and you then see this band photo.
You say to yourself, “Hey, don’t be judgmental. Maybe these guys are great.”
Okay, so they’re calling their new album Replica of a Strange Love. That’s not the worst title. Yes, it’s hard to get past a song title like “This Summer’s Sorrow II: Growing Old in the Waiting Place.” “A Fractured Dovetail Romance” is also a groaner. Ditto “Our Distress Entwined.” And wait, “Nietzsche is Dead”? Says the press release:
Replica of a Strange Love is introspective, utilizing the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, LaVey and more to make sense of human reactions and sociological phenomena specific to ongoing events.
Oh lord. But at least there aren’t any labored metaphors, right? Singer-bassist Justin Fornof says, “Define labored.”
“I created a metaphor when writing the lyrics [for “Anemic (The Same Six Words)”] that I thought summed up the entire concept. You’re trapped at the bottom of a dark well, treading water while the level slowly fills. The longer you tread, the more leeches you attract. More and more effort is exerted to keep your head above the surface, and the closer you to get to climbing out the more blood is drained from your body. In a lot of ways, it’s a Catch 22: You either escape as a shell of who you used to be or sink and become a leech.”
Turns out your first reaction was dead on!
POST-SCRIPTS
ALUMNI UPDATE. Although I can find no supporting evidence, my trusty Google Sheet tells me I’ve written about The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer. The Vancouver duo released an album in 2017 called Apocalipstick, and they’ve apparently decided that title is too good to leave in the past. Post-Apocalipstick arrives May 7. “You can’t make this shit up,” says BNB patron Josh Modell.
“You Only Move Twice” was written by legendary Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder. He’s notoriously reclusive, but Mike Sacks scored an incredible interview with him for the New Yorker that you should read right now. “What does this have to do with band names?” you ask. Nothing!