#54: Follow him, for he is the one
The Callous Daoboys; PoonTickler; Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night; If I Die First
The Callous Daoboys
I enjoy a good spoonerism, and the “Callous Daoboys” is solid. Here’s the question: Did this Atlanta band go through a list of NFL teams for inspiration? Their hometown team wouldn’t work—the Falanta Atlcons?—but their options were limited if you think about it (though I like the goofiness of “Brenver Doncos”).
The septet self-identifies as “mathcore metalcore”—so, screamy vocals with heavy songs in odd time signatures, complemented by goofy song titles: “How to Attack the Oldest Roller Coaster in America,” “She Thinks My Tractor Beam is Sexy,” “Mausoleum Neeson,” “Are You Serious?! Right in Front of My Salad?!”, “The Elephant Man in the Room,” “What is Delicious? Who Swarms?”
About 365,000 people swarm, apparently. When frontman Carson Pace made a “WAP”-by-way-Plain-White-T’s joke a couple years ago, Cardi B retweeted it. He was also canned from his job that same day, though I don’t know if the two are related.
PoonTickler
No one will be surprised that this Miami two-piece plays grindcore—sorry, “sexgrind”—but will anyone expect a woman in front? Probably not, because no other genre traffics in misogyny quite like grindcore. Even incels would tell grindcore dudes to tone down their gleefully graphic lyrics about mutilating women. (To be fair, they talk about mutilating toilets with apocalyptic digestive problems just as often, if not more.) Fittingly, PoonTickler superimposed its band photo on a filthy bathroom next to some urinals.
That’s Morgehenna on the left and, on the right, a guy who looks like an alternate-reality Scott Hutchison, who left Scotland for Florida, tatted up, and got into grindcore instead of forming Frightened Rabbit.
PoonTickler’s bio notes their “recurrent lyrical themes are sex, lust, and putrid gore,” which are plainly visible in the songs from their debut full-length, Sex Gore & Grindcore: “Choking on Menstrual Chunks,” “She Sucked My Dick from the Back,” “Fecal Fingerbang,” “Sacrificial Shit Circle,” yada yada, you get it.
If you’re curious about deeper meanings to those songs, Morgehenna has helpfully submitted the lyrics for a couple of them to lyrics.com. When I clicked on “Choking on Menstrual Chunks,” I was greeted by an interstitial ad for the Wall Street Journal with the boldfaced headline “Stories That Matter to You.” As if to say, “Sir, as someone interested in scatological grindcore, you’ll want to stay on top of today’s business news.”
The lyrics “She’s smelling ripe today / Smell the blood running down her pantleg” immediately followed the ad. Top notch ad targeting, WSJ. By the way, nice work on that Ohio rape story, you clowns.
Peculiarly, “I Want an Ass to Fuck My Ass” censors “fuck” in its lyrics, even though it’s in the title on the page. “Sexy donkey I want to f*ck / Some come stick it inside my butt.” Yes, it’s about anal sex with “thick donkey dong.”
Sometimes I stop and wonder, “This is my life?”
Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night
“Melding the holistic, layered ambience of slushwave with the melodic worldbuilding of dreampunk…” goes the bio for Desert Sand Feels Warm at Night, a.k.a. William Hallworth-Cook. It presumably continues after that, but I stopped at “dreampunk.”
Wikipedia says it’s a “microgenre” of electronic music with a “focus on cinematic ambience and field recordings, combined with various traits and techniques from electronic genres such as techno, jungle, electro, and dubstep.” Also, Jesus? Take a look at the track listing for 2021’s New World Disciples.
Eternal Hope
Follow Him, For He is the One
Travelling Through the Darkness to Find the Light
Let the New World Rise Above
He is Here
Let the New World Guide You to a New Life
Let Your Soul Illuminate with the Passion of a Thousand Sons
Come with Us
It’s not a recent phenomenon for Desert Sand. Their 32 (!) releases since 2018 include titles like Called to Heaven, Journey to Utopia, and another that’s just a yin-yang symbol. Hallworth-Cook keeps a low profile online, so it’s hard to say if he’s a believer or simply dabbling in new-agey titles to suit the “chill high-end spa” vibe of his music, but he’s probably released another album in the time it’s taken me to write this newsletter.
All we have to go by is this statement on his Bandcamp and Twitter: “If music didn’t exist, the sand wouldn’t be warm.” Not that you would feel it my precious, precious child: Desert Sand was carrying you!
If I Die First
Melodramatic name, even more melodramatic songs: “I’ll Never Let Them Hurt You,” “My Nightmares Would Do Numbers as Horror Movies,” “Is It Me or Your Secrets That Keep You Up at Night,” “Time Moves Faster When You’re Dancing in a Graveyard,” and, oh lord, “Mirror, Mirror, This is Nothing Like You Promised.” There’s something nostalgic about the band’s screamo, which sounds straight out of the early aughts emo-hair-and-eyeliner days celebrated by Alternative Press. Like this, from 2005:
Here’s If I Die First:
There’s a good reason for that nostalgia. IIDF features Travis Richter of From First to Last, a group that helped popularize all that stuff in the early aughts. They had an album called Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has a Bodycount and looked like this:
Closing the screamo circle of life, Alt Press sang the praises of this “bona fide supergroup” back in 2020. “Supergroup”? Well what would you call a band featuring a member of From First to Last and emo-trap artists Lil Lotus and Lil Zubin?!
Personally, I’d call it “skippable,” because emo-trap sounds like the worst genre in history. One listen to the late Lil Peep makes a compelling case, y’all. Other dead artists, such as Juice WRLD and noted awful person XXXTentacion, are also associated with emo rap, but at least Juice WRLD had some good stuff.
Genres are increasingly meaningless, which I appreciate conceptually, though the results can sound godawful. Still, I like Richter’s self-awareness in that Alt Press interview. When writer (and Alt Press legend) Jason Pettigrew asks how they describe their music, Richter says:
Screamo! It’s got to be screamo. I’m one of the godfathers. [Laughter.] Round two screamo. Early screamo is way harsh. It’s tight, though. I really love actual screamo. But I do like the gentrified screamo.
“Gentrified screamo” sounds way tighter than emo-trap.
POST-SCRIPTS
BNB #19 alumni the Goon Sax have announced their breakup. Respect for calling it quits even when they had big tours lined up with Pavement, Spoon, and Interpol. I hope they toast their accomplishments with mylar sacks full of cheap wine.
Vomit Forth, whom I apparently wrote about during in the Year in Band Name, has a new album, Seething Malevolence. Catch them on tour with Sanguisugabogg, who take first place for Most Illegible Band Logo:
The answer is no, obviously.
I would kill for a Frightened Rabbit or Owl John cover of Napalm Death. Perhaps “The Chains That Bind Us”? Dammit, Scott.
More terrible If I Die First song titles: “Just Another Body at the Bottom of the Lake,” “People Like You Make People Like Me Disappear,” “bloodstainedeyes.”
Shoutout to BNB lifestyle enabler Eric Grubbs for the PoonTickler refer. Thanks?