#32: Visceral wrath is still in our stomachs

Dual Pterodactyls; We Hate You Please Die; Life in Sweatpants; Whispering Sons

Aug 11, 2021

Hey, remember how I said the next issue of BNB would be “on time, dammit”? Apologies. Work has been brutal, so let’s adjust expectations going forward: The regular issue of BNB will arrive in the first half of the month, and the bonus for paying subscribers the second half. And now, on with the countdown.

Dual Pterodactyls

When I explain Band Name Bureau to people, I say it’s a newsletter about silly band names. If I were asked to go deeper, I’d say it celebrates bands like Dual Pterodactyls, a two-piece from Augusta, Maine, that released a slew of digital-only albums with titles like Deep-Fried Space Shuttle or Go Big or Goat Holmes.

The songs on these releases all clock in around 30 seconds and have titles like “A Pan Full of Foodstuffs,” “Get Me to the Dermatologist,” and “Granola Bar for My Car,” and “Pecker Tracks”:

Something about me that people don’t know
Is that I can’t tell the difference between
The difference between
The difference between
An alpaca and a llama

Dual Pterodactyls’ album We are the Shark Triple EP LP has songs like “Orange,” “The Dark Tower,” and “The Simpsons,” whose lyrics are “My favorite color is…,” “My favorite book is…,” and “My favorite TV show is…” respectively. There are 75 tracks, nearly all under 10 seconds.

All of these albums are dated 2018 on Bandcamp, and it doesn’t look like Dual Pterodactyls have been active since before the pandemic. Seems like it’s more than time for a comeback.

We Hate You Please Die

Naturally, they’re French. And deadly serious. Asked to describe their new album, Can’t Wait to Be Fine, they say, “If the topics are tough, having fun is not overlooked, for if this visceral wrath is still in our stomachs, it mustn’t keep us from dancing with the rest of our bodies.” Yes, fun is not overlooked, but… “visceral wrath.” Most native English speakers don’t have that kind of vocabulary. You will not be surprised to learn they have a song called “Melancholic Rain.”

Life in Sweatpants

You may think this band was born during the lockdown and emphasis on leisurewear, but no, Life in Sweatpants has been around since at least 2017. Four years later, the mysterious group has released only five songs and done zero press as far as I can tell. Their Bandcamp page only says they’re from California, and the most I could find was this article from 2017 that quoted them saying their “backstory is pretty boring,” before adding:

our first thought was: no comment.. but we argued over whether or not that makes us sound like assholes (which we’re not, promise)… so we thought maybe something along the lines of —–> does anyone really know where this music stuff comes from? in reality, you’re sitting at a computer fidgeting in Logic and sound comes out of the monitors (in this case a synth bass) that inspires a girl sitting on the floor behind you, who starts humming something and ta-da you’ve created music…

The boring backstory checks out! Whoever Life in Sweatpants are, that quote is proving the point of some guys in my high school who insisted electronic music was all computers and zero talent. I could make a compelling counter-argument in the early ’90s, but now it seems like technology has caught up with their prejudice.

Whispering Sons

Sometimes all it takes is one word to sink a name. Sure, it could be something obvious like vulgarity, but Band Name Bureau is all about going beyond the obvious. While I can understand on a practical level how a name like, say, the Cunts would be deeply offensive to many people, it’s pretty trite when you think about it. Construction like “The [offensive word]s” takes zero imagination. I wouldn’t even reward it with outrage, because so little effort went into conceiving it. Here in the niche world of Band Name Bureau, Whispering Sons is a more offensive name than the Cunts, and I’ll tell you why: “Whispering” is awful. No word that follows can recover. It connotes a cringing earnestness or maybe witchy goth-lite imagery that warrants a hard pass. I did a quick search in Bandcamp to see if anything could disprove my “Whispering is terrible” assertion, and here’s what I found: Whispering Man, PsyWhispering, Whispering Leaves, Whispering Egg, the Whispering Tree, Whispering Jackie, Whispering Ned’s Ventilation Shed, the Whispering Kiddo Cult, Whispering Walls, Whispering Wires, Whispering Rock, Arctic Whisperings, Whispering Mirrors (tag: “dark dungeon music”), Whispering Tears, Whispering Witch (see?), Whispering to Dad, This is Whispering, etc. We needn’t go on, because POINT PROVEN. Also, Whispering Sons? You’re off the hook. Whispering Leaves and Whispering Tears, may I have a word?

POST-SCRIPTS

All that said, Whispering Sons is pretty good. I wonder how tired they are of being compared to Joy Division.
Have you read Nothin’ But a Good Time? It’s the oral history of Sunset Strip rock, and it has a good amount of discussion of band names. I learned, for instance, that Quiet Riot’s label wanted them to change their name to Wilde Oscar. Irish poets were huge in LA in the late ’70s and early ’80s!