#11: Life, uh, finds a way

Erotic Novels; Redundant Protoplasm; Fuck Yeah, Dinosaurs!; Razor Braids; Black Holes are Cannibals; Weakened Friends

Sep 08, 2020

Welcome to issue six of Band Name Bureau, written during a heatwave (110+ degrees) in a pandemic under skies cloudy from massive fires! Things are going great, everybody.

Erotic Novels

About: “We rock out with our books out.” As I typed “erotic novels” into Google, it tried to auto-complete “erotic novels for women.” The first result? A story with the headline “The Sexiest Erotic Novels of All Time” from… Esquire. You know, the magazine that has (had?) “MAN AT HIS BEST” on the cover. Curse your SEO, Esquire. At least women contributed to the story?

Redundant Protoplasm

The name doesn’t scream “goregrind,” but their Bandcamp page does. The wallpaper is ostensibly gory, but I can’t really tell what I’m seeing, so I’m not grossed out by it. That’s not the case for the cover of Demo ’19, as it’s clearly some poor soul whose face and skull have been ripped open. It’s the kind of cover that promises song titles like “Rapid Cellulite Prolapse” (i.e., fat falling out or something?), “Forced Ingestion of Endometrium Abscess Discharge” (having to eat something from a ruptured uterine lining), “Emaciatophobia” (fear of being too thin), “High Caloric Dysphagia” (dysphagia means difficulty swallowing…so maybe difficulty swallowing a calorie bomb like a Monster Thickburger?) “Runaway Systolic Arterial Rupture” (an especially bad heart rupture?) and, sigh, “Clit Ripper.” More often than not, these kinds of bands have issues women, or at least love to write about violence against their bodies. To wit, the band Clit Ripper, which Encyclopaedia Metallum tells me formed in Portland in 2005. They’re not around anymore, but at least they were able to release 2007’s In Front of the Kids, which features songs like “Abortion Buffet,” “Murder and Rape,” “Execute Everyone,” and “Rip Your Clit and Watch You Die.” (No need to click “Show lyrics” on that one.) Redundant Protoplasm just dropped the late-summer jam “Lithotomy Induced Ovipositing of Cystolithiasis,” which means—let me see if I can parse this—stones being laid like eggs in a bladder during a surgery to remove stones? I don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to mean. Look for the song on Redudant Protoplasm’s upcoming split with Hallucination Realized, available soon on Rectal Purulence Records.

✅ Dude playing in shorts ✅ Dude in sleeveless shirt ✅ Dude playing instrument way up high

Fuck Yeah, Dinosaurs!

If you’re the type to name your band Fuck Yeah, Dinosaurs!, then you’re the type to name your sophomore album 65 Million Beers Ago. And naturally, all of the songs would be dinosaur themed, like, “Life, Uh, Finds a Way,” “Earl Sinclair (What a Guy),” “(I Don't Wanna Go) In the Museum” (lyrics: “I don't wanna be a fuckin dry boned fossil / wake up in the morning and i eat my waffles”), and my favorite, “URA Dinosaur.” Lyrics:

YOU ARE A DINOSAUR
You woke up today, Your hands are claws
Your face is elongated With Savage ripping jaws
You're fucking starving, Gotta find something to kill
How did this happen? It's a nightmare of a thrill
You have a blood thirst, What's that your [sic] feeling?
So many are dead and The bodies got you reeling
Can't fuckin help it, Everyone runs from you
Can't fight the instinct And There's nothing you can do
WAKE UP IT’S TIME TO START ACCEPTING

If you’re having a hard time accepting that, just know that Fuck Yeah, Dinosaurs! supports you on your journey.

Razor Braids

The Year in Band Names used to have a recurring category called “Plays on Words” (I didn’t say it was clever) for this type of name. Examples include Swimsuit Addition, Rational Anthem, Girth Control, that kind of thing. They often elicit a muted reaction, like a quick “hmm” that translates to “I see what you did there.” Razor Braids follows in that tradition, though at least it feels thematically aligned, as the all-female Brooklyn quartet plays poppy indie rock with some attitude. Well, to date they’ve only released one song, the wistful and lovelorn “Nashville.” Nevertheless, they’re confident: “Rock band of ur dreamz,” boasts their bio. And they’re nothing if not supportive of each other:

Black Holes are Cannibals

“Supermassive black holes are cannibals, new research suggests,” says a 2012 headline from the Christian Science Monitor. It continues: “Astronomers have found black holes and supermassive black holes. But the discovery of a mid-size black hole could support the idea that supermassive black holes grow by eating others.” Because black holes aren’t enough to wrap your head around, why not make them crazier? Here’s something easier to understand: an “Atmospheric Sludge Metal” band from England that goes by Black Holes are Cannibals. Because BHAC records and posts their practices, they’ve have dropped 11 releases since February of this year. At the very end of August, they released a four-song album called Special Telemetry Research and Tracking, which features songs like “1972, Michigan: John Shepherd Begins His Work” (28:53) and “Dual-Channel Oscillator” (24:37). Fans didn’t have to wait long for more, as a self-titled two-song EP arrived yesterday, featuring “Bellow, Healing Sound” (29:57) and “In Ecstatic Detritus” (22:18). A special edition of 20 “home-dubbed cassettes” immediately sold out, because people can’t get enough of shitty-sounding nostalgia. The cassette resurgence has been going for nearly a decade by this point, which is roughly a decade longer than we should have tolerated. While part of me appreciates the resurgence of a format that requires work in the on-demand age, a bigger part of me remembers cassettes as an “it’ll do” format, to be used when better ones weren’t at hand.

Weakened Friends

I don’t know much about this trio from Maine, but they hooked me with their tweets: “There’s vocoder on our new record and I hope everyone fucking hates it.” “There’s banjo on our new record and I hope everyone fucking hates it.” This leads to their Twitter bio, which simply says, “I hope you hate it.” Also on their Twitter feed is a delightful introduction to their new, cleverly named Patreon, the Friend Zone. (At the top: “Weakened Friends are creating Bad Jokes + Mediocre Music.”)

I should do a round-up of bizarre perks bands are including in their Patreons during the pandemic, because a cooking show with guitarist-vocalist Sonia Sturino would be among them. “It’s the most vulgar cooking show you’ll ever see,” says bassist Annie Hoffman. It’s available at the $15/month level.

POST-SCRIPTS

The paying-subscriber only bonus edition of BNB arrives around 9/15, and it will feature a fun interview with Tim Kasher of Cursive and the Good Life fame. I held the strobe light in Cursive’s surprisingly controversial version of “We Built This City” for the first season of A.V. Undercover. (“Controversial” because readers felt it was too ironic or something, if memory serves.)
I talked band names in a recent interview with Riot Fest, where I’m mostly coherent. Check it out.
Band Name Bureau attracts only the most intellectual of music fans:
One-man band Prism Tats, featured in the 2017 Year in Band Names, has changed their name to…Gary V, the shortened moniker of founder Garret Van der Spek. There’s a long quote from Van der Spek about the change that I’ll spare you from, but to commemorate it, Gary V released a new song and video called “Eternal Return (Deja Vu).” Raves YouTube user Lazy Gigolo: “good stuff... but the name Gary V for a group or a singer is really idiot.”
Weakened Friends, Erotic Novels, and Razor Braids are good!