#9 La vida tranquila

Healing Potpourri; Gim Kordon; Snakes Don’t Belong in Alaska; Off Road Minivan; The Gay Agenda

It’s August. Does it matter? I’ve been likening the past few months to an old episode of The Twilight Zone, where everything seems normal, but something’s off. Then at the end you find out the characters are in hell or something. Only instead of half an hour, this episode will last at least a year. That’s the scariest twist of all!

Quick note: There’s an NSFW illustration at the bottom.

Healing Potpourri

I thought I’d seen it all. I’ve done this for roughly 15 years, and I’d taken every name bands threw at me. Georgia O’Queef. Gay Witch Abortion. I Shit on Your Face. Michael Cera Palin. I could not be fazed. But 2020 has delivered a name so profoundly terrible that it forced me to stop and think, “What’s the point of this anyway?” That name is Healing Potpourri.

Healing.

Potpourri.

Healing.

POTPOURRI.

It’s the softest name of all time. You could call your band Fluffy Clouds & the Cotton Balls, and you’d still look like Anal Cunt compared to Healing Potpourri. “Okay fine,” you say, “Healing Potpourri. Big deal.” Your hubris! You don’t know the Soft Emperor Palpatine you’re dealing with, because these dudes called their new album Blanket of Calm.

BLANKET. OF. CALM.

As a show of cushiony force, Healing Potpourri opens Blanket of Calm with a song called “Dream Vacay.” There’s also a song called “Dustin’s Rain Tape,” because everyone in this septet undoubtedly owns a rain stick. (Rumor has it a former member got the boot for only having a didgeridoo.) The album’s penultimate song is an instrumental called “La Vida Tranquila,” which sounds like straight-up Muzak. I’m not trying to be mean, because I actually find Healing Potpourri’s easygoing contrarianism charming, but “La Vida Tranquila” is what used to be known as elevator music. In fact, Healing Potpourri specializes in music for people who find yacht rock too aggressive. I would describe it as confrontationally soft, which seems contradictory, but band founder Simi Sohota basically says as much in an interview.

“The way I see it is, there’s a difference between escape and a healing refuge. Escapism to me sounds like apathy to the struggles of the world we’re facing today. I don’t want to escape those truths; I want to confront them.”

Sohota intends his music to be restorative, and the headline of that interview describes the group as “the antidote to 2020’s madness.” That overstates things, but Healing Potpourri’s chill positivity may help you feel less rageful.

Oh, and the name?

“I was at a thrift store in Sacramento in 2011. It might have been Thrift Town, which actually just closed, but I can’t remember. There was a skylight with a ceiling fan in the window, and the light was pouring through and shining on this bag of potpourri. It was shimmering and I was mesmerized. I took a quick video on my phone and uploaded it to YouTube, and I called it Healing Potpourri.”

Ninety-eight views and counting.

Of course one of them is wearing a captain’s hat. (Photo by Malindi Walker)

Gim Kordon

Not two issues ago, we encountered the godawful name Yonic South, and now this. Like Yonic South, who hail from Italy, Gim Kordon comes from Helsinki, Finland. If we’ve learned anything in our five-edition journey of Band Name Bureau, it’s that European bands love Sonic Youth-inspired spoonerisms. Playing it straighter than their Italian comrades, Gim Kordon performs the kind of melodic indie rock that recalls mid-’90s Chapel Hill, which helps explain how they opened for Superchunk. They’ve also opened for Kim Gordon, sort of, as Gim Kordon played their first gig in 2012 at Helsinki’s Kuudes Aisti festival, which Gordon headlined. We may never know what the Sonic Youth co-founder thought of Gim Kordon, but the band’s bio says they gave her a pin. Maybe they didn’t talk much, because all of Gim Kordon’s songs are in Finnish—“Ei Ole Helppoo,” “Se On Muutos,” “Yöhön Tummaan,” etc. I always appreciate foreign bands who sing in their native tongue, though I should run those titles through Google Translate to make sure they don’t mean “White Power Forever” or some nonsense. (Update: They don’t.) In fact, the video for Gim Kordon’s song “Vladimir” calls out the Russian autocrat for his homophobic agenda. The video’s description has an open letter to Putin, which says, “Take it easy Vladimir and let all the flowers bloom.” I don’t think he’s gotten the message.

The Goo vibe of this cover can’t be an accident.

Snakes Don’t Belong in Alaska

[Adjusts glasses.] Well actually, the common garter snake can be found in Alaska, albeit in the far southeast. But this “face melting psychedelia” band from Newcastle, England, isn’t here to argue zoology. “It’s actually a reference to our love of video games,” says bassist/vocalist Aaron Bertram, “and is actually a direct quote from one of the greatest video games ever, the fantastic 1998 PS1 title Metal Gear Solid.” (Checks out.) The phrase “face melting” implies velocity to me, but SDBIA demands patience. The shortest song of the four on their double LP clocks in at 14:59, the longest 21:44. The description of the album provided by their label uses both “drone” and “droning” in the space of 65 words, so this isn’t face melting in the same way as, say, Converge. Then again, who is?

Off Road Minivan

Some bands use jokey names to reflect their sense of humor (like the great Pkew Pkew Pkew), while others have jokey names but deadly serious music. New York state’s Off Road Minivan falls in the latter category, which I quickly realized watching the high drama of the band’s videos for “Spiral Gaze” and “You.” I should’ve known by the press release, which describes Off Road Minivan as an “alternative rock band” (hey it’s 1992 again!) that has a “collective passion for ’90s grunge” (called it). I also should’ve known because the group is on Tooth & Nail Records, which specializes in melodramatic punk, emo, and hardcore (often by bands who love Jesus). Scrolling through the label’s Wikipedia page, you’ll find dreck like Underoath, Emery, Further Seems Forever, mewithoutYou, and too many others to name. Off Road Minivan continues that legacy, as their confusingly worded press release notes: “Their ability to harness nostalgia in both lyric and tone revealed a band that not only appreciated, but embodied the emo genre.” I’ve read that sentence many times, and I can’t understand it. Maybe it’s the harnessing nostalgia part, because a) what does that even mean, and b) it doesn’t sound complimentary. It sounds like Off Road Minivan can only write through the filter of nostalgia, which is a pretty astute criticism of certain flavors of emo (though not a selling point for these guys). Then there’s this line about Off Road Minivan’s new debut full-length, Swan Dive: “It includes the band’s hardest and softest instrumentation yet, proving they’re as dynamic in skill as they are in sentiment.” No one can be happy with that sentence.

“Dude, we agreed we would all wear dark shirts for the photo shoot. What the hell is that?”

The Gay Agenda

Back in BNB #2, I wrote about Middle-Aged Queers, a fun-loving Oakland queer-punk band with great merch. San Diego’s the Gay Agenda look like fun dudes in their photos, and their songs have titles like “Power Bottom,” “Dick Print,” “Friends Without Benefits” and “Cartilaginous Perspective and Studies About the Micro Anatomy of a Blow Job,” but their gritty, screamy hardcore does not fuck around. For a taste, check out their unrecognizable cover of Björk’s “Army of Me” or “Homo Riot,” which features Justin Pearson of the Locust. Or check out the NSFW cover of their new album, Penetrating, below. As much as Band Name Bureau celebrates bands who have a decent sense of humor (or at least self-awareness), I appreciate the backbone in the Gay Agenda’s music. The interview they did with The Hard Times made me like them even more. Here’s a context-free quote that’s representative of the whole thing:

“We keep changing our getups on stage. For a while I was wearing some prosthetic breasts but eventually it became a physical hazard. People keep asking ‘Where are the breasts?’ but I have to tell them, ‘No, they’re retired.’”

POST-SCRIPTS

• No way was that album cover going anywhere except the very end. Like I said, the Gay Agenda does not fuck around.

• People have often asked me if bands ever get mad about appearing on my lists. Occasionally. Pkew Pkew Pkew didn’t seem to like it, which bummed me out a little. You should still check out Optimal Lifestyles though.

• Between BNBs I was contacted by a guy named Jesse Hermann on behalf of My Fake Band, a Cards Against Humanity-esque party game that traffics in goofy band names. Players draw a band-name card (like Galaxy Equator Gladiators) and a genre card (world music), then come up with song titles the hypothetical group would write. They didn’t reach their Kickstarter goal, but they’re taking preorders anyway.

• Unrelated to band names: My former corporate siblings at Deadspin are starting their own site, Defector. If you don’t know the story, they quit en masse last fall when the site’s new owners—who also own The A.V. Club and The Onion—cracked down on its content. (Hence Defector’s tagline, “All of our bullshit, none of theirs.”) It’s subscription-based, which means none of the obnoxious ad experiences you’ve come to experience on the G-O Media sites. Good for them!