#28 A penchant for all things obnoxious
#28 A penchant for all things obnoxious
We Never Learned to Live, Goat Sanctuary, Yndi, A Gazillion Angry Mexicans, Birthday Ass
We Never Learned to Live
Bandcamp bio: “Post-rock inspired cathartic misery.” Don’t everyone go clicking at once! Bandcamp’s servers can only handle so much traffic. “Post-rock” definitely fits as a description, provided you consider Thursday post-rock.
Goat Sanctuary
If you want to learn how the goat’s head came to be part of occult and satanic imagery, there’s a lengthy Wikipedia page breaking down its origins. I highly recommend it if you suffer from insomnia. The short version: The goat-headed deity Baphomet became closely associated with the occult in the 19th century, and you can draw a direct line from that to this Seattle band. Notably, legendary thrash band Sanctuary also hailed from Seattle, so it seems like these guys just added Baphomet to their local thrash forebears and, boom, Goat Sanctuary was born. The band has the attendant metal logo with an inverted cross for a “T,” and the cover for its latest, Cthonic, checks all the boxes for a metal album cover:
But there’s no getting around the petting-zoo nature of the name. As Band Name Bureau enabler Josh Modell put it, “When I hear ‘Goat Sanctuary,’ I think of a really nice place where kids can pet goats, like Lambs Farm.” To their credit, Goat Sanctuary seem to get that.
I would travel back to Chicago to see Goat Sanctuary perform at Lambs Farm. Let’s make it happen, dudes.
Yndi
In 2017, French-Brazilian songwriter Yndi Ferreira decided to go by her first name instead of her previous moniker, Dream Koala. Good call.
A Gazillion Angry Mexicans
In 2021, it’s either bold or stupid for four (seemingly) white dudes from Melbourne, Australia, to have a name with “Angry Mexicans” in it. Or a Speedy Gonazalez-esque tweet:
I didn’t even have to do any tweet sleuthing for that: They’ve only tweeted 32 times in eight years and have only 17 followers. Maybe that’s not enough to get the Twitter Outrage Machine going, even with the username @agazillionmex. Then again, they self-describe as having “a penchant for all things obnoxious.” Such as this bio:
With rhythms as heavy footed as having old gods living in the apartment upstairs, space-edge jam guitars like Jerry Garcia flying the millennial falcon and grooves dirty enough to make you forget your mothers maiden name.
The malapropism “millennial falcon” is evocative, though. The ship’s unreliable hyperdrive could be powered by their sense of self-righteousness!
The quartet mostly have no qualms about their name, as bassist James Coelli told Hysteria: “I was a little bit stressed with the name once, given there was a chance that Trump wouldn’t actually let us into the country.” I think 45 would be into anything that even remotely sounds like it’s mocking Mexicans.
Birthday Ass
And then there was Birthday Ass.
It’s not the kind of name that evokes the prestigious New England Conservatory—or really anything involving the word “conservatory”—but Birthday Ass is composed of six jazz/classical nerds from said school. As such, their hard-to-classify music is both heady and silly—imbued with a spirit bandleader and vocalist Priya Carlberg describes as, “Oh, I know my instrument well, but fuck you, school!”
Never have article tags worked better as a visual gag than that interview:
POST-SCRIPTS
For non-Chicagoans, Lambs Farm is this awesome place staffed by people with developmental disabilities, about 200 of whom actually live at the farm itself. It’s a popular kids’ destination in Chicagoland, where interaction with animals besides pets or rats is rare. Like everywhere else, it was hit hard by the pandemic, so if you have a few bucks to spare, donate to help their awesome mission.
ALUMNI UPDATE. Remember Hard Nips from the 2009 Year in Band Names? No, of course not, but they’re a quartet of women of Japanese descent. (Read that name again.) You’d think such a name would be disastrous for googling, but props for their SEO: When you search “hard nips,” their Facebook page is the No. 1 result. No. 2? A Healthline article titled “Why Are My Nipples Hard? 10 Possible Causes.” Hey, at least it’s not porn! Though if you image search “hard nips,” you get plenty of that. Anyway, they have a new EP out tomorrow called Master Cat.