#45: The story of Fartbarf
"There's never an excuse good enough for this."
The name “Fartbarf” is a cul de sac.
First, the long road of the Year in Band Names could’ve ended in 2012, when Fartbarf made the list (and the headline!). Why continue? The simple, visceral stupidity of Fartbarf is a two-syllable endgame.
I imagine playing a high-stakes game of chess at a ritzy casino in Monte Carlo. (Why are they playing chess in a casino? I don’t know. I’ve never been to Monte Carlo.) On one side of the board, I sit, wearing a white tux, calmly swishing a brown liquor in a tumbler with a single ice cube. On the other side: three dudes in grotesque neanderthal masks and astronaut jumpsuits. With effortless grace, one of them moves a piece to my king. “Checkmate, Mr. Ryan,” he says in a robotic voice. The dozens of onlookers gasp. “Well done,” I say, “well done.” I down the rest of the liquor in one gulp, calmly set down my tumbler, and exit into the night, humiliated.
Second, Fartbarf is brazenly, barfingly self-limiting. No matter how good the music—and Fartbarf’s music is surprising and good—plenty of people won’t give it a chance because of the name. With the overwhelming variety of music we have at our fingertips, people want a reason to skip something. And Fartbarf practically begs them to do it.
It’s working, if Spotify is any indication. Although Fartbarf has been around since 2008, they draw a scant 7,472 monthly listeners. (Not helping: Their only full-length, Dirty Power, came out in 2014, and their last single came out in 2020.)
Naturally, the LA-area trio is asked about their name in every interview, or at least in all of the ones they did during their first, like, five years of existence. This is to be expected, and members Josh McLeod, Dan Burley, and Brian Brunac understand what they’ve brought upon themselves.
“It’s pretty much the worst name in the world,” McLeod told LA Weekly in 2012, before adding that the name preceded the band. A couple other interviews have versions of this story, which McLeod told the LA Record in 2014:
We have no story! Why are we called Fartbarf? We don’t know! We needed a name quick. I took a road trip to Delano, California, and that town smells like absolute crap. Not to say the people aren’t nice, but I think they must have a factory there that reclaims manure. I stopped at McDonald’s to take a leak and there was a little sticker that came off a dot-matrix printer that just said FARTBARF. And I was dying laughing. And it stuck in my head. Not as a name, just for fun. We got fartbarf.com just to make email addresses for our friends. And when we needed a name, that was it.
That’s not to say the band hasn’t ret-conned a meaning onto the name. As McLeod told BNB pal Dan Ozzi in 2014 for Noisey:
Basically, we kind of chose that name to keep us sort of grounded. …Why is this always so hard to answer? There’s never an excuse good enough for this. [Laughs] Our music and the time we have when we play shows, the name itself represents that, where it’s kind of fun and painful at the same time.
He put it more simply in that LA Weekly interview: “Farting is funny, barfing is painful, so those two verbs seem to fit well with the music we make.”
That interview describes their music as “analog electronic thrash music.” In a 2019 LA Weekly interview, McLeod said, “I think we consider ourselves a live, aggressive dance band. If I sum it up in a sentence, it’s if Hot Chip met Devo met Slayer.”
To get specific, Fartbarf is a trio of a drummer and two guys playing analog synthesizers, with heavily processed, robotic vocals. It’s a far cry from the sloppy punk rock made by 10-year-old boys implied by the name, and that’s the only way the name is helpful:
“People have very low expectations,” McLeod says in Noisey. “When we deliver something beyond that, for some reason, their minds are kind of blown a little bit more than they normally would be. [Laughs] I think a lot of people come to Fartbarf and they think it’s gonna be a really grindy, terrible punk band that doesn’t know how to write songs.” He adds later, “Sometimes I feel like if people are willing to give a band a chance and look past that, maybe they’ll just be able to enjoy the music for what it is.”
The fundamental precept that guides our work here at Band Name Bureau Laboratories holds that time tames all names, no matter how outrageous. Yes, even Fartbarf, a name so objectively idiotic that it makes Diarrhea Planet sound intellectual. As McLeod says in that 2019 LA Weekly story:
“The name to us is so commonplace now that we don’t laugh or blink at it. After 10 years, we’ve finally become numb to the absurd quality of it. But I think at the end of the day, it’s served a purpose, which has gone beyond what we anticipated. It’s really good for Google searches, obviously. There’s only one group of people in the world that would want to call themselves this, and work hard as a band. Make it happen. A lot of times early on, venues didn’t want to put our name anywhere, let alone on the marquee at the front of their establishment. It was refreshing the first time we saw our name on the side of a building—we’re actually accepted now.”
I was worried because Fartbarf hasn’t updated its Twitter or Facebook pages in years, but their Instagram is active, and they’re playing shows. To rephrase Sam Elliott at the end of The Big Lebowski: I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ they’re out there—Fartbarf, takin’ ’er easy for all us sinners.
POST-SCRIPTS
That 2012 LA Weekly interview has some funny stuff in it, like this:
Did you consider Barffart?
Yeah. It’s funny; a lot of people can’t pronounce it as it is now. 50% of the people literally can’t pronounce those two words combined.
Which part of your name do you think more encapsulates what you're all about, the fart part or the barf part?
I would say the barf part. We’ve all done more than our fair share. We do a lot of drinking before shows.
Why the neanderthal masks? McLeod explains in that 2019 interview: “We thought it would be fun to mesh future and primitive. We’re these space neanderthals playing futuristic instruments, even though they’re kinda dated at this point. We came upon these masks from the ’40s at an old costume shop in Arizona that was closing, and I bought a lot of them. We wore them for hundreds and hundreds of shows until they started rotting off of our faces. Our current masks that we’ve had for a few years now, they’ve been custom-made by a Hollywood exec. We have a couple of spares, so hopefully we won’t lose them. It’s always on the back of our mind, though.”
Dan Ozzi asked McLeod to judge whether some names he made up were worse or better than Fartbarf: Puketurd, Cocksweat, Titjizz, Analdiarrhea. See Noisey for the answers!