#88: A deep sustained or monotonous sound
Barry Can’t Swim; X Will Mark the Place; We are All Human; Her Head’s on Fire; Aim for the Bushes; Brigitte Calls Me Baby; Survive Said the Prophet
NB: There’s a small, kinda NSFW drawing down below. It may not get you in trouble with HR, but it won’t do you any favors, either.
And hello new readers! I have no idea where you came from, so settle in for some nonsense.
Barry Can’t Swim
“When you start this shit, you don’t think it’s going to become your whole life! I thought the name was a bit of a funny joke and just ran with it.” It’s a tale as old as time, or as old as Band Name Bureau #3, when A. Swayze & the Ghosts said the same thing. The person saying it this time is Joshua Mainnie, who tossed off “Barry Can’t Swim” for his DJ/producer project in 2020, then was stuck with it once his popularity surged. That’s the whole story. In Mainnie’s home country of Scotland, Alex Burns of The Herald writes that the DJ “is reluctant to tell me whether he can actually swim—he likes to keep people guessing.” Truly, there’s no more edge-of-your-seat mystery than wondering if someone can swim.
X Will Mark the Place
Considering this Chicago band plays riff-heavy “dark hardcore,” how likely is it the name comes from Radiohead’s “Where I End and You Begin”? Let me add this: They have a song called “I am Untethered and My Rage Knows No Bounds,” which sounds super hardcore, but it’s about…a bad driver?
sick ride
what’s the mileage?
got tons of room?
wish i could buy it
i’m just playin
i can’t deny it
i just find it stupid funny that you’re not even awake to drive it
However, that does explain the “What the fuck’s up, Denny’s?” energy of these live pics:
We are All Human
I appreciate a band whose bio basically defies you to listen. The one for We are All Human (or WAAH) says the NYC group plays “noise drone rock” featuring “fuzzy detuned guitars” and “drony bass lines.” If you’re unclear about drone rock, just add guitars to Merriam-Webster’s definition of “drone”: “a deep sustained or monotonous sound.” Don’t everybody go clicking below at once, because Bandcamp’s servers can only handle so much.
I do appreciate this kind of thing. I just imagine it makes for awkward family interactions during the holidays.
Cousin They Only See Once a Year: “Hey, are you still playing music?”
WAAH Member: “Yeah, I just started up a new band last spring.”
CTOSOAY: “Oh yeah? What kind of music is it?”
WAAHM: “Uh, it’s like…drone…rock?”
CTOSOAY: “Did you say drone?”
WAAHM: “Yeah…”
CTOSOAY: “Like the things that fly with cameras?”
WAAHM: “Oh, uh, no, no, like…slow, sustained, uh…noise?”
CTOSOAY: [stares blankly]
WAAHM: “But, like, loud.”
CTOSOAY: [Beat.] “How’s your mom?”
Her Head’s on Fire
Since I started tracking band names in 2005, I don’t think any person has appeared in three different groups I’ve featured. Readers, this is truly a momentous occasion—and it should’ve happened sooner, because Her Head’s on Fire has been on my list since they formed.
The band is the latest project featuring Joseph Grillo, a.k.a. Sid Jagger, whom BNB readers may remember from #83 and Gay for Johnny Depp. After that, he played in I Hate Our Freedom, which I’m sure I wrote up in the Year in Band Names, but I can’t find it on avclub.com anymore.
Grillo’s a lifer, having spent years in the post-hardcore band Garrison, a good band with a workmanlike name. He joins several other lifers in Her Head’s on Fire: Chicago punk fixture Jeff Dean (too many bands to list), Rodrigo Palma of Saves the Day, and Jeff Gensterblum of Small Brown Bike and the Casket Lottery. That’s all up my alley, if you’re tracking the Kyle Ryan Demographic. In fact, Jeff Dean and I have bonded over our love of Bob Mould, and he even named one of his bands after a Sugar song (Explode and Make Up).
Dean’s current band also takes its name from a song: “Dag Nasty” by Dag Nasty, from 1987’s Dag Nasty. (Not really, it was Wig Out at Denko’s.)
Fear is the law, duty is pain
Shame is necessary
To grind the edges from our minds
Our minds
She’s hurting now
She let the smooth taste fool her
Now when she opens up her eyes
Her head’s on fire
“Fear is law, duty is pain / Shame is necessary” are better lyrics for “I am Untethered and My Rage Knows No Bounds” than whatever X Will Mark the Place was talking about, but we can’t fix that now.
“I normally take pride in naming all my bands, but all my band names got rejected,” Grillo said in an interview for the podcast As the Story Grows. Now that’s a shame, because you don’t reach the BNB Three-Timers Club without some personality (and now we need to know his other ideas). Dean is the one who suggested Her Head’s on Fire. “It’s like, ‘Oh fuck you,’ that’s a great name,” Grillo said.
I suspect the title of their first full-length was his, though: College Rock and Clove Cigarettes. That’s why he’s a three-timer, y’all.
Aim for the Bushes
At least three bands have claimed this moniker. The first one hasn’t updated their Facebook page since November 2011, when it said “phase one” of its demo was complete and hoped to post the songs “by this week.” They were never heard from again, and considering this logo (?), good riddance.
Influenced by the Murderburgers, Blink-182, Green Day, and How I Met Your Mother, the other Aim for the Bushes hasn’t posted since July 2014, when it linked to a teaser of a new song, “Where’d You Learn to Drive Like That (Grand Theft Auto).” The full track never arrived, and the promise of their Facebook bio—“fun, bouncy music that will be stuck in your head forever”—went unfulfilled.
There is an active band using this name that hails from NYC, and at least one of them is a hunk who likes nut-hugger jean cutoffs and the King of Beers. Is your thirst trapped yet?
Uniting these disparate dudes is fandom of the 2010 Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg comedy The Other Guys.
Brigitte Calls Me Baby
Listen, we’re all trying to be better people. There are no easy fixes for the petty gripes or emotional baggage we carry around. But if we try every day to be just a little bit kinder, more understanding, and more patient, maybe we can eventually become, as the bumper sticker advises, the people our dogs think we are.
But then you see one band photo and it all unravels.
From this photo, you will not be surprised to learn that frontman Wes Leavins portrayed Elvis in a production of The Million Dollar Quartet or that he worked as a musician on Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. His band’s name comes from an expected and unexpected place, as Leavins told WTTW:
In high school there was a project in English where we had to write to a notable person, and I chose to write to Brigitte Bardot. I wrote her a letter and received a letter in return and then exchanged a few more and at one point was almost like a pen pal.
Becoming pen pals with Brigitte Bardot is Max Fischer-level precocious, and it sounds…unlikely. But even if it’s BS, it fits the band’s whole thing. Brigitte Calls Me Baby plays decidedly retro-sounding rock, which my old A.V. Club colleague Alex McLevy accurately describes as Roy Orbison fronting the Smiths, or the Strokes with Elvis. It’s all pretty well done, and it certainly isn’t a sound you hear much these days.
In the meantime, we’ll keep working on ourselves. At least I’m the person my cats think I am.
Survive Said the Prophet
OK, I can only endure so many self-serious photos, everybody. Let’s just try to get through this. Here’s how singer Yosh explains the moniker:
About the name, a “prophet” is someone who knows both the future and the past. But... if people only know the answer, the future can change. A true prophet doesn’t change the future but tread his own way to achieve it. He doesn’t keep trying to improve the future. The name itself is related to the music that we love so much, to survive with it.
While Survive Said the Prophet is Japanese, Yosh is a native English speaker, so we can’t blame that mumbo jumbo on a bad translation. However, when you watch the melodramatic video for “Mukanjyo,” the overwrought explanation makes perfect sense.
POST-SCRIPTS
In that same episode of As the Story Grows, Grillo offers his 2022 take on the name Gay for Johnny Depp: “He’s a pretty guy. He has nice cheekbones. What can I say?” Dag Nasty has an album called Can I Say. To quote Milhouse Van Houten…
I wondered if “Mukanjyo” means something in Japanese, but Google Translate just says it means…mukanjyo. When I turn on “detect language,” it tells me it’s chichewa for “come on.” We all know that chichewa is a Bantu language spoken in Malawi and parts of Zambia and Mozambique, so I won’t rehash that. However, a typically pissy Reddit post says “mukanjyo” means “emotionless” and Google will tell you so if you just spell it a different way, moron. Delete your account!