#86: Dispatch from 2024 music festival season
Smoking Gives You Big Tits; DJ Fart in the Club; Dana Nada & DanDan; Newfound Interest in Connecticut; Caution Elderly People; Moms With Bangs; Egon’s Embrace; A Day Without Love; Gumby’s Junk
Since 2021, it’s been Band Name Bureau tradition to peruse the lineups of upcoming music festivals for artists who fall into the BNB demographic. What does that entail, you ask? I don’t know. But like my old pal Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote about hardcore porn, I know it when I see it.
2024 offers an especially large bounty. This year I checked the lineups of roughly 40 festivals from a list I started keeping about six months ago. Most of them offered nothing of note, but you gotta pan through a lotta dirt to find the gold that is Smoking Gives You Big Tits. Let’s examine the nuggets I found.
Smoking Gives You Big Tits
Where: Manchester Punk Festival
Literally nowhere else would describe this name as“gold,” but we here at Band Name Bureau take pleasure in life’s simple stupidities. No one’s arguing it’s a good name, but at least it stands out on a poster, unlike the boredom patrol that is Coachella. “It’s just something that I quite literally wrote on the back of a fag packet once,” says vocalist Helen Taylor. (Here I should mention SGYBT comes from England, where “fag” is slang for cigarettes.)
She adds, “If it had been another day we could quite easily have been called Smoking Makes You Dead Cool and Distracts People From Your Face, Smoking Makes You Have Big Hairy Balls and Smoking Makes You Smell Like Mild Regret and Pies.” I think I love this band?
DJ Fart in the Club
Where: Primavera Sound
Primavera Sound’s bio for this Korean DJ notes her “witty, bewildering name,” which reflects the mandatory politeness required of festival organizers. Bewildering? Eh. Witty? C’mon. The bio sounds nonsensical when it describes DJ Fart in the Club’s wide artistic palette, which “mixes giddy techno, trance, broken beat, garage and even Eurobeat, happy hardcore and other reviled genres.” I don’t have the energy or interest to learn why any of them is reviled, but Wikipedia helpfully tells me that happy hardcore is different from happy gabba (?) because it “tends to have breakbeats running alongside the 4/4 kick drum.” This kind of subgenre word salad accompanies everything I’ve seen about DJ Fart in the Club. This site extolls her “flawlessly bending genres and vibes from Detroit electro to UK rave, techno, acid, trance, house and faster, harder leftfield electronics.” DJ Fart in the Club says at a recent party she threw down “ppongjjak (Korean gabber), trot, footwork, hardcore, donk, jungle, trance plus all the other weird fast shit.” Donk? Gabber? Footwork? Happy gabba? It probably makes more sense when your serotonin receptors are being fried by molly.
Dana Nada & DanDan
Where: Texas Eclipse Festival
I keep thinking this is some kind of palindrome, but nope, it’s a DJ combo of Dana Nada and DanDan (not this DanDan). If that sounds confusing, just gaze into the madness that is the poster for Texas Eclipse:
Newfound Interest in Connecticut
Where: New Friends Festival
Checking out Tell Me About the Long Dark Path Home tripped my emo alarms before I heard a note. Track eight is called “I Can See Your Breath Rising in the Air,” which segues into “On My Back Watching the Northern Lights Recede,” for god’s sake. My immediate thought was this album could’ve come out in 1996, and I wasn’t far off: Newfound Interest in Connecticut formed around the turn of the millennium and broke up in 2005, but is reuniting to play the kinda rad-sounding New Friends Fest. It’s like if venerable punk haven 924 Gilman Street started a festival. The website notes the festival “strives to create a mutually empowering atmosphere” to “encourage a diverse artistic scene where audience members can see themselves and their identities reflected in the performers they see on stage.” Gender-neutral bathrooms, all ages, zero tolerance for dickish behavior… they even have staff on site trained in the use of anti-overdose drug Naloxone! I’m not joking when I say this warms my punk rock heart.
Caution Elderly People
Where: Manchester Punk Festival
What’s the senior equivalent of the ice cream man? A Metamucil truck? “Caution Elderly People” would be painted on the side.
Moms With Bangs
Where: Tentacle Fest
If you name your band Moms With Bangs, then titling your album Jazzercised only makes sense. Of course, you’ll DIY the recording, but it won’t go well. (“We tried recording this thing ourselves twice until we realized frankly we don’t know how to do this,” says their Bandcamp.) Leading off with a song called “Adrenochrome” is a bit of a left turn conceptually, but maybe it’s also kinda perfect? And why not describe yourselves as “sweaty, slippery meat-enthusiasts”? A+ work all around.
And hey, speaking of Gilman Street, here’s Moms With Bangs performing there.
Egon’s Embrace
Where: Texas Eclipse Festival
This is the alter ego of Serbian psychedelic trance producer Mlađo Ivanović. He wrote a highly personal and very detailed 200-word bio on Soundcloud about how Egon’s Embrace is “an ongoing metamorphosis” that is “almost like a painting drawn with sounds” and is “as much philosophy or poetry as it is music.” “I see it as an open invitation for the audience to have a voyeuristic peak [sic] into my soul and endure whatever screams back at them… Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and drown with me.”
Sure, got it, but Ghostbusters.
A Day Without Love
Where: Camp Punksylvania
No.
Gumby’s Junk
Where: Mosswood Meltdown
This name reminds me of a classic Onion story, Don’t Tell Me You’ve Never Wondered What Yoda’s Penis Looks Like. Only instead of Yoda, we’re imagining what Gumby has down below. I mostly know Gumby from repeatedly watching Saturday Night Live: The Best of Eddie Murphy as a kid, and all these years later, I still don’t know what Gumby’s deal was, exactly. And I’m old! So how do these Oakland “art rock post punk surrealist estate” youngsters even know Gumby? And why go with this name after debuting under the (admittedly less interesting) name the Bayonettes? These are questions for which we may never have answers, because I can’t find any explanation.
POST-SCRIPTS
BNB pals Middle Aged Queers are playing Tentacle Fest with Moms With Bangs. Am I allowed to suggest MAQ start a side project hardcore band—maybe with members of fellow BNB alumni the Gay Agenda—and call it Fag Packet? I’m not, right?
I couldn’t leave my dumb joke well enough alone. I had to go reading about A Day Without Love: “A Day Without Love began in 2013 after experiencing homelessness for a short period of time in 2013. The words ‘A Day Without Love’ came from a poem that Brian wrote after witnessing and stopping domestic abuse on his college campus.” The solo project of Brian Walker “is on a mission to spread good vibes and help others rise above their own struggles.” Well, shit.
“And are you actually claiming that back in 1999, you sat through all of Phantom Menace, not once wishing that the gusty winds of Coruscant would give Yoda a little skirt-blow? You’re telling me that when we first saw fellow Jedi Council member Yaddle, you just saw a female member of Yoda’s species and not the beginning of a new story arc that could potentially provide a perfect opportunity to show Yoda naked? Man, you're even more repressed than I thought.” Classic.
Oakland’s Mosswood Meltdown is pretty awesome. John Waters is hosting, and it has a fascinating lineup that includes Red Kross, Pure Hell (playing the West Coast for the first time in 30 years, according to the SF Chronicle), Big Freedia, queer-punk legends Pansy Division, and a ton more. The B-52’s even pushed back their retirement to headline.