#94: Words describing travesty and sadness
Extra Large Holiday Card; Man/Woman/Chainsaw; My Sister’s Fugazi Shirt; Bored at My Grandmas House; Blunt Chunks; December Screams Embers
Extra Large Holiday Card
One of the bellwethers of adulthood is the holiday card, or at least it used to be. I have no idea if Gen Zers and the like continue the tradition, but I realized I was getting old when my friends got married and started sending them every year.
My family usually does it too, but I opt for 4-by-8-inch cheapies from Walgreens. I see no point in doing anything more, but I have friends who clearly spend a lot of money on theirs: heavy card stock, multiple folding panels, fancy envelopes, expensive family portraits. Maybe it’s a flex—and if so, seriously?—but I wouldn’t describe any them as “extra large.” Nothing like this bad boy, available with your custom text for $25.88 from something called zazzle.com!
Information about the artist Extra Large Holiday Card is limited. Reddit tells me it’s the side project of Chris Freeman, guitarist and vocalist for emo stars Hot Mulligan. Freeman doesn’t veer far thematically from his main band in XLHC (as it’s stylized), but he opts for electronics instead of Hot Mulligan’s guitar-forward approach.
Rest assured it remains emo AF. I like Hot Mulligan, though I find the vocals tiresome after a while. They’re that style that grew dominant in the early 2000s, coinciding with the rise of screamo: the sing-shouty thing where vocalists strain in their upper register for an effect that can’t help but sound a little (or a lot) whiney.
Freeman doesn’t get too shouty in XLHC and mostly talk-sings in a way reminiscent of sad boys like Band Name Bureau alums Guccihighwaters and sadeyes.
As for the name Extra Large Holiday Card, who knows? Freeman hasn’t done many interviews, and he doesn’t go into it on his socials. He has a Cameo account, but it’s inactive, so there goes my “happy birthday and here’s where my band name comes from” idea.
However, Hot Mulligan hails from Lansing, Michigan, which is less than 90 miles from Frankenmuth (“Michigan’s Little Bavaria”). There, you’ll find Bronner’s Christmas—sorry, CHRISTmas—Wonderland, the “world’s largest Christmas store.” It’s an astounding 27 acres and open year-round, with “50,000 trims and gifts,” but apparently no Christmas cards, extra large or otherwise.1 That feels like an obvious side-hustle opportunity for Freeman: CHRISTmas Cards by CHRIS.
Man/Woman/Chainsaw
Man/Woman/Chainsaw are currently enjoying a good amount of buzz, following a quick rise in London’s indie scene. How quick? Just a few years ago, co-founders Billy Ward (guitar) and Vera Leppänen (bass) were just 16-year-olds playing Nirvana and Lana Del Rey covers for funsies. Now they have a new EP on taste-making label Fat Possum produced by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band.
Unsurprisingly, write-ups tend to call them a “precociously talented” “youthful London combo,” or “teenage troupe,” or “teenage art-punks,” etc. Yet none of these articles comment on their name, which is conspicuous for a band with such an unusual one. While Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s publicist tells me they’re “tight-lipped” about its origins, it doesn’t explain why music writers haven’t said anything.
That’s even more surprising, considering its origins are pretty obvious and interesting. Googling Man/Woman/Chainsaw returns a Wikipedia page for Carol J. Clover’s 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film. The book includes the famous essay Clover published in 1987 called “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” that introduced the horror-movie trope “the final girl.”
As Clover writes in a new introduction to the book, the idea quickly took on a life of its own. In the decades since, it’s been oversimplified and decontextualized, because her searing analysis doesn’t make for fun BuzzFeed quizzes:
“To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development… is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking. She is simply an agreed-upon fiction and the male viewer’s use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies as an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty.”
So can we presume the uni students in Man/Woman/Chainsaw are either fans of horror, gender studies, or both? Nope! “The band admits they haven’t read the actual book but liked the title enough to take it for themselves,” says a 2023 write-up in The New Age Magazine.2
My Sister’s Fugazi Shirt
We’ve talked about Snark Entrapment before, but this feels like Pedant Entrapment. Those of us who grew up with Fugazi as our Punk Rock North Star will trip over ourselves to loudly/obnoxiously point out that the band famously made no T-shirts or merch of any kind.
However, that didn’t stop bootleggers from filling the void with stickers, posters, and, yes, T-shirts. The one I remember seeing said, “This is not a Fugazi T-Shirt,” in a flimsy attempt to avoid legal hassles. It’s still out there in various designs, like this one from Redbubble:
You can find other designs on a bunch of sites, because stopping fake merch is a game of Whac-a-Mole. That said, people probably aren’t ordering Fugazi T-shirts like they were in the ’90s, so hopefully these jags aren’t making much from their crappy shirts.
Thus entrapped by my pedantry, I’ll add that the name My Sister’s Fugazi Shirt presents another challenge. Name-checking another artist in your moniker can’t help but prejudice listeners. Maybe they won’t totally expect you to sound like a legendary post-hardcore band, but they probably won’t expect, say, “nostalgic electronic sounds reminiscent of the 90s polygon era.”
But that’s what Ryan Naglak does. The sole member of My Sister’s Fugazi Shirt “grew up listening to indie rock,” according to an interview, and played in noise and ska bands in his younger days. Now very much an adult (an optometrist, even), he followed his pangs of nostalgia not back to the Fugazi-adjacent music of his youth, but to video games.
The remake of Final Fantasy VII got him thinking about video-game music, and his Bandcamp bio describes My Sister’s Fugazi Shirt as “inspired heavily by early Playstation eras.” He has a slew of music that would fit in those old games, with album art that looks like Playstation covers.
He’s also created soundtracks for games that never existed. For Devil Cartridge: Demo Disc, he and Alabama vaporwave artist Frogmore crafted a backstory about an old game that was banned for supposed Satanic content, with the two of them bringing the game’s “eccentric soundtrack” to life.
Frogmore and My Sister’s Fugazi Shirt met online, which just goes to show: No matter how niche your interests, someone online shares them. And thus, QAnon.
Bored at My Grandmas House
Every summer from the mid-’80s into the early ’90s, I spent at least a week at my grandparents’ house in East Hartford, Connecticut. My grandmother was infirm (and ill-tempered), which limited how much my sweet, put-upon grandfather could do to keep me entertained. So I read a lot of books and made do with whatever my grandmother watched on the house’s sole TV. They didn’t have cable, so options were very limited—like “regional telecasts of candlepin and duckpin bowling” limited.
Amber Strawbridge, a.k.a. Bored at my Grandmas [sic] House, had it better. The story goes that an “idle day rifling through vintage synths in her grandma’s attic” inspired her to start doing music.
Inhaling my grandparents’ second-hand smoke while fetching them Busch Lights all day only inspired me to count down the days until I left.
Blunt Chunks
Spend a moment with this name, and let your mind conjure something to go with it. What do you imagine? I get Mr. Bungle vibes: something anarchic, abrasive, and best in small doses. Probably made by dudes who look like barbacks.3
Like me, you probably didn’t picture this:
I don’t think sole member Caitlin Woelfle-O’Brien would, either, judging by Blunt Chunks’ origin story. In an Exclaim! interview, she explained how it came from a conversation with a former partner who was working on a project called Girls Gone Bong.
“I was like, ‘That’s horrible,’” Woelfle-O’Brien remembers. She jokingly suggested adding “featuring Blunt Chunks.”
And yet Woelfle-O’Brien chose Blunt Chunks for her own. The press materials for her debut full-length, The Butterfly Myth, enhance the cognitive dissonance. Woelfle-O’Brien wrote the album in rural Quebec during “a self-described mental health spiral” catalyzed by an unexpected breakup and the death of her father following a long battle with dementia. There’s also a whole thing about the cellular process of metamorphosis (hence the album title), along with stuff about Greek mythology (hence the song “Psyche’s Flight”).
All of that, and yet…Blunt Chunks.
December Screams Embers
“This sounds like a joke emo name from a TV show,” said my A.V. Club pal Josh Modell when forwarding me a press release for this band a couple years ago. While he’s correct, the press release disagrees. While they are many things, emo isn’t one of them: December Screams Embers mix “elements from Hard Rock, MetalCore, Post-Hard Core, Pop-Rock, DeathCore, Acoustic.” The press release also refers to them as a “diverse Rock/Metal band.”
Diversity comes up a lot in this long zine interview from last year, specifically referring to the group’s many genres (Hard Rock and MetalCore?!) and the members’ backgrounds. But it doesn’t elaborate, just like newer press materials don’t elaborate on what makes December Screams Embers “LGBTQ icons.”
That interview does go deep on the name, though. Guitarist Will Jensen mentions the myth of suicides spiking during the holidays. “I also picture it as a piece of art and not December literally screaming embers, but December. Screams. Embers,” he says. “To me it’s three separate words describing travesty and sadness at a time that should be joyous.”
Vocalist Jordan “Rage” Fjeldsted goes further: “We are embers in the cold of December. A primal scream for those with mouths held shut. A reminder that, like embers, you can always reawaken your flame. I want to be a guidepost and a comfort to those who need our flame.”
Time to pass the torch, Cheap Trick.
POST-SCRIPTS
Coming just before Thanksgiving: the annual BNB thanks list.
At least online. While I visited Bronner’s when passing through Frankenmuth in the late ’90s, I don’t remember if I saw Christmas cards. The place is overwhelming, like a Jesus-y casino.
I only found this after spending way too long digging into Clover’s work and then googling her name + Vera Leppänen. But hey, we learned something along the way, right?
This is how my old A.V. Club pal Sean O’Neal once described the way members of GWAR looked out of costume. 💯