#90: Proper triggering
Neverland Ranch Davidians; Goodbye Blue Monday; Jaws the Shark; Goth Jafar; Bikini Trill; Manic Pixie Dream Boat; Lord Friday the 13th
Neverland Ranch Davidians
What do you get when you combine the Neverland Ranch, the former home/amusement park of Michael Jackson, and the Branch Davidians, the fringe religious group known for their deadly standoff with federal authorities in 1994? “Distorted psych, primal rockabilly, hairy-assed punk and chicken-fried soul like nothing on earth,” according to the bio for this LA trio.
Said bio begins, “As the name suggests, The Neverland Ranch Davidians don’t care a hoot for the niceties of popular culture.” True, the name is pretty dark once you remember 82 Branch Davidians died (including 28 children), and Neverland Ranch was, at best, creepily childlike and, at worst…well, watch Leaving Neverland.
But hey, no one’s here to read about horrible shit! Let’s shift our focus to this flyer from last March. Neverland Ranch Davidians played with a band called Carnage Asada! That’s something, right?
Goodbye Blue Monday
Goodbye Blue Monday self-describes as “misery punk,” and if their Bandcamp hadn’t given away their location, I could’ve figured it out in two guesses. “Misery punk” feels like a Scottish concept, and wouldn’t you know it, Goodbye Blue Monday hail from Glasgow and Edinburgh. When one site asked them to describe the band in three words, they replied, “Shite, miserable, Scottish.”
We know they’re Scottish, and the miserable part definitely tracks, judging by how often suicide comes up in their music. There’s “Trigger Alert” (“I think I’m gonna kill myself / Tonight, tonight is the night”), the video for “Meet My Avatar”…
…and then the 16-minute (!) “Hara-Kiri” from last year’s Let’s Go Goodbye Blue Monday By Goodbye Blue Monday. (That song is preceded by a 34-second ambient track called “Hello! Hope You’re Enjoying the Album, Just a Wee Warning: This Next Song is Proper Triggering.”) Other songs on the album include “I’m a Fucking Coward & My Anxiety is Breaking Me” and “I’m Old & I’m Fat & I Still Hate Myself.”
On paper, this all sounds unbearable, but Goodbye Blue Monday doesn’t wallow. The songs are fast(ish), melodic, shout-along punk, topped off with a palpable sense that the quartet doesn’t take itself too seriously. Only once you dig into the lyrics does it become clear frontman Graham Lough is battling some serious shit. But Goodbye Blue Monday wrap it up in such a pleasing punk package that the misery part is easy to overlook.
Like their forebears in New Order, Goodbye Blue Monday took inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut. While his seventh novel is best known as Breakfast of Champions, its full title is Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday. New Order drummer Stephen Morris was reading it when the group wrote the classic “Blue Monday.”
It’s probably no coincidence that failing mental health is a prominent theme in Breakfast of Champions. The long psychotic break of the main character, Dwayne Hoover, drives the plot. His wife kills herself, and their son, a closeted gay man who goes by the name Bunny, suffers from severe depression and has his own breakdown that nearly lands him in a mental hospital.
Beyond that, Vonnegut lost his mother to suicide when he was in his early 20s. In the intro to the book, he writes:
I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of people with goiters. So did Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer who is the hero of this book. Those unhappy Earthlings had such swollen thyroid glands that they seemed to have zucchini squash growing from their throats.
All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to consume less than one-millionth of an ounce of iodine every day.
My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were supposed to make her sleep.
When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again.
And so on.
So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.
If only it were that simple. Still, Kurt Vonnegut was the original misery punk.
Jaws the Shark
Oh, that Jaws.
Goth Jafar
To those who say the internet isn’t real life, I present Goth Jafar: a DJ who grew up on Tumblr then took their name from Twitter.
In 2014 there was a moment in time when twitter titles were just a play on words of the Spice Girls or random goth aesthetics. There would be titles like ‘Trill Spice’, ‘Corn Spice’, ‘Goth Spice’, ‘Health Goth’, just stupid shit like that. For my own twitter title I thought Goth Jafar would be cute because I had an obsession with Aladdin growing up, and I’m half-Moroccan so I wanted a piece of my Arab heritage in there in some form. Goth Jafar was born and I never changed the title, it just stuck and at that point it was my branding. I love goth things, I love darkness and I feel like you can hear creepy jarring sounds in my sets. I always love a cute balance, however, as its [sic] all about a dichotomy of evil and good, bubbly and dark, and just very Gemini shit.
Just Very Gemini Shit would be a solid album title if Goth Jafar ever went that route.
Bikini Trill
Lots of Angelenos probably encountered this band the same way I did: by seeing the name stenciled on the sidewalk in Silver Lake. It being LA, the words Bikini Trill could mean just about anything, but turns out it’s a trio that plays a mish-mash of soul, funk, and laid-back rock. You know, with songs called “Sticky Treez.”
That Spotify preview box is small, so here’s the artwork at a larger size so you have a better idea of what we’re dealing with:
If you want some further info, their Spotify bio says, “We love - Haribo gummy bears - Wes Anderson movies - the best weed - playing shows.”
Come to think of it, Bikini Trill works as a name for a particularly potent, energizing sativa strain. This is what living in LA for five years did to my brain.
Manic Pixie Dream Boat
My former A.V. Club colleague
has spent the years since he coined the phrase “manic pixie dream girl” wrestling with the trope he cleverly named. It has long since become part of the pop culture vocabulary, and this isn’t the first time I’ve written about a group using some version of it. (I featured Manic Pixi in the Year in Band Names at some point.) This trio hails from Olympia, Washington, and really leans into the last word in their name. “Manic Pixie Dream Boat is bound to take you on a listening journey amidst the crowded seas,” says their Facebook bio. A review of their self-titled EP from KEXP suggests the group has “boatloads of promise.” The manic pixie dream girl has conquered land; apparently now it’s time to head to sea.Lord Friday the 13th
According to the minimally punctuated, all-caps 200-plus word bio on their website, Lord Friday the 13th self-describe as “a dollar store trash-glam-punk band” from Austin. The group, fronted by siblings Felix and Sloane Lenz, has a theatrical, androgynous, New York Dolls kinda thing going on.
That inevitably leads to assessments like this one from ATX Today: “If you like bands that keep Austin weird, you’ve come to the right place.” I don’t know that the city’s much-merchandised weirdness directly influenced a song like “Wallace & Vomit,” but it certainly fits Lord Friday the 13th’s whole thing.
The moon’s made of cheese
it makes me wheeze
being lactose intolerant
makes me wallace and vomit
If you sense a couple of theater nerds, you are correct. The group’s bio notes that Felix and Sloane grew up “homeschooled/unschooled” and isolated in their small hometown of Athens, Texas (population 13,007). Getting involved in community theater allowed the duo “to get comfortable on stage and break out of their shyness.”
Kids being homeschooled in small-town Texas had me imagining cloistered reactionaries teaching that Earth is 6,000 years old and Jesus anointed Donald Trump, but nope. Some quick googling turned up a story about Michael and Catherine Lenz, who, judging by their social media, are Felix and Sloane’s parents. And they don’t seem to be the types to protest at libraries.
The elder Lenzes left Dallas for Athens in the early ’90s and opened up some art venues in the town, and the Athens Daily Review says the couple’s “playful approach to the arts” heavily influenced other arts spaces that opened. They also laid the groundwork for their children’s band, according to ATX Today:
Our dad always, since we were little, said, “One day, they’re gonna be in a band.” There was a little music store in our hometown and he would trade the owners stuff for musical instruments. He was like, “One day you’re gonna want these.” And then they did come in handy, so it’s funny because he didn’t really play music or anything.
It’s not clear how they settled on the name. When asked who Lord Friday the 13th is, Felix said, “At the beginning, it was just the band name, and like, it still is just the band name. But I also feel like I’m kind of embodying Lord Friday. I feel like it is the character, but then it’s also the whole dynamic.” Sloane added, “It’s kind of that twin thing—kind of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
BNB eagerly awaits the arrival of Duke Nightmare on Elm Street and Sir Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
POST-SCRIPTS
Misery punk also made me think of the great Off With Their Heads, and in an interview, Goodbye Blue Monday said, “We get compared to them ALL THE TIME.” I know my misery punk, y’all.
I spent the first 18 or so years of my life in Texas, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Athens. Says Wikipedia: “The city has called itself the ‘Black-Eyed Pea Capital of the World.’ Athens was selected as one of the first ‘Certified Retirement Communities’ in Texas.” Wait, you’re telling me a couple of kids with a flair for drama and performance didn’t want to stick around in Texas’ first Certified Retirement Community?
Speaking of Texas, as I mentioned in my programming note, I’m spending the summer here with my in-laws. InfoWars Flag Guy has upgraded from a simple logo to a black-and-red American flag version with a “Don’t Tread on Me”-style snake, but, like, more bitchin’.
