Farstucker

Today we've got some rather bad band names for you, so if you're the sensitive type of reader, we suggest you cover your eyes and stop reading, right now. That means you. Yes, you! Both of you.

OK? Good.

See, we're back on the road to our usual outpost in Oakland, and we'll just pretend that's the excuse for not having posted one yesterday (really, going to go play at the climbing gym had more to do with it, but for formality's sake, we'll just pretend it was because we were traveling).

Anyhow, we got a text from base camp yesterday: New euphemism for man sauce, also possible BNotD:

Slut Dressing. Wow. Where do they come up with it? Well, to be honest, they probably find these things in a vodka bottle, but that's neither here nor there. Anyhow, Slut Dressing is a pretty obscure sort of thing, so it could be just about any sort of band, but probably not something that'd ever make it too big. Some sort of indie band, probably a local secret with a tiny but fierce following.

Anyhow, we got a follow-up message today, which happens to be the perfect reaction for the morning after seeing a Slut Dressing show:

Guilty Hate, which can be nothing but a death metal band, unless it's a goth band. Dark, to be sure, and probably loud and violent sounding.

And there you have it. Two Band Names Of The Day, for today and yesterday, both straight from the root at the Warped House.

The Zoo

For today's Band Names (yes, plural!) Of The Day, we have a whole cage full from our agent in the armpit of California Fresno!

She, apparently, was driving down an alley in a desperate bid to go somewhere, when a swarm of bees blocked off the alley and forced her to slow to a crawl while they interrogated her windshield. Just think what would have happened if she's driven a bit faster. We could have had real-world experience with our band names! Which are:

Bee Goo, which is probably more of a Nick At Night sort of band name, but might still work quite handily for something like a jam band or some sort of hipster side project. Still, not as cool as:

Suicidal Swarm! This must and can only be a powermetal band. A batch of leather-clad, strung-out screaming freaks with long black locks and guitars with spikes coming out of them. Truly hard core.

Still, this balances out the other story we received from the same deeply embedded source, who came home to find a package from something she'd ordered on Etsy. It had a stamp on the wrapper, of an owl with hearts for eyes and a love letter in its beak. Bang:

Lovesick Owl, which is a hipster band of course. A real shoegaze group, addicted to owls, passive emotions, heavy glasses and having hair in their eyes. No match for Suicidal Swarm here.

The Four Horsemen

Some days beg the question about whether there should be such a genre as musical deconstructionism. Not the snooty, philosophical sense, but in the sense of a musical theme for destruction and apocalypse.

Of course, it really doesn't hurt that we have friends like Jeff & Greg, a friend and a friend of a friend respectively, who got back to us with some suggestions which we, being enterprising bastards, combined into a band name and an album name. Because we're good like that:

Melodious Wreck, a band specializing in crunchy electric bass, steel drums (as in, oil barrels), found instruments and really loud amplifiers. Their first album will be called Of Course You Want A Blowtorch, and will most likely come with welding goggles. Or perhaps some tool of destruction, because protective gear really doesn't go with the theme here.

Little Red Riding Hood

Sometimes, you just gotta wonder at the things office workers talk about. It seems that superpowers come up a lot, and they very frequently have very little to do with office work. Invisibility seems to be a popular one, as is talking to squirrels.

Wait, what?

Yes, someone in an office building right here in Northern California suggested that talking to squirrels would be an awesome (although admittedly useless) superpower. Why? So you could raise an army of squirrels, of course!

Just like that, a Band Name was declared found, an email was fired off with all the precision of a squirrel sniper, and then, bang!, the Band Name Of The Day is:

Army of Squirrels. They're artistic side project of Army of Gnomes' singer and guitar player, and play cutesy art-rock popular by women with awkward dresses and men with even more awkward mustaches. They have a good name, and the skill, but not the style.

Te Dum, Te De

We have two band names for you today! One is strange, and the other one is, well, a bit stranger.

Story the first:

Some of us were in the kitchen, cheerfully making a delicious leek/broccoli/kale stirfry, and the comment was tossed out "you're a great kitchen gnome!" This, of course, was not acceptable to an individual of this particular stature, and the comment was returned: "Gnome? I'm like a whole army of gnomes!"And there you have it:

Army of Gnomes: a groove rock band from Kansas City, in fact, the only groove rock band in Kansas City. They're very good, and have a great name, but, well, they're in Kansas City. Or would be, if they existed. Prove us wrong, please! Create a band called Army of Gnomes in a place where they could actually go places!

Not that Kansas City is a dead end or anything, we'd never suggest that! It's just that in our experience, there's nothing there.

The second Band Name Of The Day, the Bonus Band Name Of The Day if you will, is:

The Neurotic Guinea Pigs! We're not exactly sure where this came from, but it seems to have emerged somehow from a conversation about eating frog legs, no doubt spawned by watching The Triplets Of Belleville, which is an excellent movie. This is a comedy act, of course, a sort of quirky jazz group.

I Drink Alone

So no shit, there we were (and "we" in this case not being the crew of the warped house as oh-so-frequently advertised, but just a single member surrounded by the rest of the company he works for) when word went out: 3:30 is beer:30, get your orders in!

Yup, the CEO was going for a beer run for anyone who was still left by 4:00 pm on a Friday (protip: in a startup, that can be very few!)

This, of course, inspired us for a Band Name Of The Day:

Executive Beer Run! They play all kinds of music, but specialize in quitting songs and slacker music: Bang On A Drum, It's A Five O'Clock World, Money For Nothing, stuff like that.

People Are Strange

In the words of Monty Python, the world today seems absolutely crackers*. Just today the news came through that Apple either screwed up or is using it's rather massive power for evil, and tracking iPhone users. Needless to say, this is "not cool" as the kids say, and clearly the best way to raise awareness and protest a computer company's use of your phone as a computer is create a band name for it. Or, better yet, a game!

To create your own personal Band Name Of The Day Apple Screwed Up, just select a word from each list, and combine them to form a band name!

List One (noun)
Apple
Network
Cellular
iPhone
Software
Cell Tower

List Two (bridge word)(optional)
Software
Programing
Uplink
Tracking
GPS
Administration/administrative
Nation

List Three (singular or plural)
Fiasco
Screwup
Spy
Treachery
Oops
Fuckup
Disaster
Mistake

And there you have it! You can create all sorts of neat band names this way, such as iPhone Upling Oops for a pop band, or The Cell Tower Administration for electronica (like Daft Punk). If you wanted to go a bit more punk rock with a tech twist, Apple Uplink Fuckup would be grand. Go wild, give us the best ones in the comments, or add new words to the list!


*The rest of that song is rather patently offensive, but we like it anyhow.

Splish Splash, I Was Takin' A Bath

Band names, good band names, are frequently thought up my musicians. I know, it's an odd thing, but when you think about it, it's not that odd. Consider who all has input into the naming of an album: musicians, of course, but then there's also drummers, girlfriend, managers, producers, lawyers, all sorts of people who really have no place in naming a band.

Let alone an album!

So it's with great joy that tonight we can present to you a Band Name, and an Album Name Of The Day, inspired by the famous Mr. Lee Presson of Lee Presson and the Nails, and finalized by the whistler Barnabas Truman!

See, Mr. Presson suggested creating an atmosphere of "instant fun" by putting a strobe light in the shower. The words "wet disco" were thrown about, and Mr. Truman applied the coup de gras:

Wet Disco!: the new album from Shower and the Strobe Lights! Come on, how could this NOT be an awesome, rockin' disco band! Now, given the somewhat ...interesting implications of the name itself, we suspect it's probably going to be contemporary disco and take itself a bit less serious than anything you might have seen in a John Travolta movie.

On a slightly more serious note, we're not aware of any currently available recordings by Truman, but Presson and his band The Nails have quite a collection of excellent swing and dance music which is, if we're not much mistaken, available on their website and on the iTunes store (but we recommend the website, because the band gets a bigger cut and we want them to keep making music). We've got all their albums and play them a lot.

Komputerwelt

Keeping a blog of fresh, unused band names is strange- some days, it just happens on its own, we've got a name (or five!) and can't wait to post the damn thing, and other days, we've got nothing. We'll either break our brains to come up with something awesome, or we'll go back to the file (which is getting thin, by the way! Send us more please!), or sometimes we just say "fuck it," and don't bother for a day.

Then there are days like today, where we really should post one, and we know there's something great out there, we just haven't found it yet. Sure enough, a text came in from some of our deep scouts in Sacramento. It seems the usual suspects had been discussing how humanity is going down the drain (read: cyborgism, genetic engineering, and other cool stuff), when someone said it was just a mater of time before we were all over run by... well, by our Band Name Of The Day:

Cybernetic Ligers, which can only be a nerd-core band. Because, really, who else knows what ligers are? OK, we do, and the deep scouts do, but that's besides the point. The Cybernetic Ligers probably have created an entire cover album of the Robocop soundtrack, done on synthesizers and ukeleles.

Bigger Harder Faster Stronger

So there we* were, careening past a nasty bit of construction on the highway 92 flyover in the Bay Area, and thinking about how there hadn't been a band name posted in a whole 24 hours. It being Friday, this clearly had to be a good one, but what?

Then, there in the middle of the construction, perched on a pile of earth like a rusting crown upon a crumbling king, was a filthy, ancient bulldozer. And bang! There was our Band Name Of The Day:

Post Industrial Noise Machine! This is, by the very nature of the name, defined as a contemporary (post-industrial) noise band with a heavy elecronica influence. Imagine, if you will, a really, really crunchy Daft Punk. Yeah, sort of like that, with some of Pink Floyd's "Welcome To The Machine" undertone noises, and perhaps a touch of Rammstein's heavy guitar work layered over a bleeding edge, ultra-contemporary futuristic sound.



*"we" in this case being just one of us.

Tequila!

Well, perhaps not tequila just yet, but it's certainly spring time, and that invariably leads into summer. Summer, when the days are long and the nights are warm, the drinks cool and the bars open late. We like summer here at BNOTD, and not just because we're all raging alcoholics.

Nevertheless, we have had a suggestion for a band name from a good friend of ours, who came up with it based on one of our favorite summer pastimes. She suggested that "Tuesday Night Mojitos" would make a good band name. She's right but something seemed not quite right, so the band name got put in the file for a while as we carefully considered this conundrum. On the one hand- it's a good name and with a wonderful homage. On the other, our guts kept whispering that it could be improved somehow.

If there's one thing we know, it's to listen to our guts when there's alcohol involved. The guts were right, of course- it was an imperfect band name because it's limiting! No good band name limits you to drinking one night a week! So ladies and gentlemen, with a slight tweak and a hefty apology to Ms. K. K., we present to you the Band Name Of The Day for Thursday, April 14th:

Mojito Nights, which could be just about anything with a hefty Latin flare. We see this as a younger, sexier version of the Buena Vista Social Club, a band that would still play all night, but then doesn't spend the wee morning just sitting in cafes or taking a nostalgic walk through Havana.

Once a good thing gets rolling, however, it rarely stops. Naturally, we had to push the envelope and see if we could make this band name even less limiting by changing it to The Drinks. Alas, it looks like that's already taken, and The Drinks are, in fact, a California rock band signed to the Pure Greed label. So much for The Drinks.

Face Come Out Of The Rain

Spring has definitely hit California. We know this because everyone's blowing their noses and dabbing at oozing tear ducts as plants attempt to procreate in our sinuses. Ah, seasonal allergies!

An allergy is defined as " having an allergy or peculiar or excessive susceptibility (especially to a specific factor)" by Princeton's WordNet. They go on to give the example of being "hypersensitive to pollen," which exactly what's going on.

In short, pollen particles are exploding from flowers, wafting through the air, and settling gingerly in your sinuses. If you're a normal human being, your body goes "huh, that's a pollen particle. That shouldn't be there. We'll just gently increase mucus creation until we blow our nose and the pollen particle gets expelled." If, however, you're as allergic as several members of the weird bunch responsible for this blog, your body's reaction goes more along the lines of "OH HOLY JESUS THERE'S TREE SPERM IN MY NOSE! WE MUST FLOOD THE AREA WITH HISTAMINES AND BLAST THE PARTICLE TO KINGDOM COME WITH A VERITABLE SNOT EXPLOSION!! AND THEN KEEP DOING IT JUST TO BE SAFE! AND THEN ADD MORE SNOT TO BLAST AWAY THE SNOT!" Spring making your eyes itch and your nose runn? Yup, that's allergies.

See, that's really all that pollen is. Tree sperm. Which means that the trees are... wait for it... yes. Exactly.

And the Band Name Of The Day is:

Tree Bukake. No, we're not explaining that. You can look it up. But not at work. And make sure your child filters are off.

A Wim Ba We A Wim Ba We

Sometimes, we have a funny story that leads up to a band name, and some days we have a really boring or idiotic story that leads up to a kick-ass band name.

Today is the second kind.

See, we were crashed out on the couch after a tasty dinner (what we had is immaterial, but suffice it to say that it was fantastic) and watching Secondhand Lions, which is a truly great movie. I mean: lions, sword fights, pesky relatives, the French foreign legion, crotchety old Texans, biplanes, helicopters, shotgun fishing, this film's got it all! But really, the neat stuff was all happening on the screen and really had very little to do with the people lolling on the couch in a food coma. But then! Inspiration struck, and we had the Band Name Of The Day:

Lions In The Cornfield! This needs to be a soul band, or maybe a southern blues band. Hell, you could swing it as an African spirituals band, if you wanted to! In any case, it'd be a great name for any body doing that sort of rhythmic soul sound, marrying the deep south back to the African roots both in name and philosophy.

Or you could make it a self-conscious reggae band from Kansas, but that just wouldn't be nearly as fun, would it?

Inna Gadda Da Vida, Baby!

Sometimes, we find band names in the weirdest of places. Sometimes (OK, frequently) those band names come out of mocking people. Today, both are the case.

See, first we were mocking hipsters and hippies and other holier-than-though cultural crusaders. This is hardly unusual for us, but it set the stage very nicely. Then, someone brought up Gwyneth Paltrow. Ms Paltrow, despite her occasionally excellent acting, has been a favorite bashing target for years due her her sweet but generally bumbling nature which tends to put her at odds with anyone with more cynicism than targets.

Specifically, that person linked to a review of Paltrow's cookbook. Wow, does that woman come off as clueless and entitled! Granted, through some no doubt cherry-picked quotes, but still. That's all beside the point, though, because she gave us an awesome Band Name Of The Day:

Hippie Shame Spiral! Really, this is a great band name! It combines an iconic cultural movement, a visceral emotion anyone is familiar with (we less than some perhaps), and that holiest of holy weird new-age quasi-religious shapes, the spiral! Ideally, we see this as a band of repressed hippies-in-recovery trying desperately to atone for their sins at the last Phish concert while still hoping to get a slice of the rock and roll pie. Which would be a good band name in and of itself.

The saddest thing about all this, however, is that Blogger's/Blogspot.com's spell check accepted "Phish" without so much as a squawk. Tells you who runs those companies.

The Four Horsemen

It's been a fat day here in BNOTD Land.

First, we got a great link to an article which a crack journalist investigates how difficult it is to come up with original band names and how weird they end up being (Crushed Bunny being the one they used as an example).

Then, in a completely unrelated incident, we got a whole list of band names from that person's husband, who writes:

Random band names, courtesy of Dwarf Fortress's random fortress name generator:

Staffbolt
Mansionvoices
Rootbridge
The Rough Authors
Praisedhall
Crystaltalked
Chapelclasped
Diamond Lens
The City of Radiance

We're no great players of Dwarf Fortress here, but we do recognize good band names when we see them! Most of these would, of course, make great fantasy metal names, but The Rough Author would be great for a literary band of some genre (cowboy music, maybe? They close each show with the Lone Ranger theme from the old radio series...), and of course The Diamond Lens would be a great name for a steampunk band, an acid jazz ensemble, an electronica band like, say, Daft Punk, just about anything really.

But the true Band Name Of The Day, picked for true crusty creep-factor, comes from a friend of ours who's a docent, currently at Alcatraz (we think). She suggests:

Fistulous Withers, which just sounds like some sort of horrific heavy metal band. Then we asked where in God's name that came from, and she told us. We'll do you the favor and not describe it here.

The Timewarp

Whoah, how did it become Tuesday already? Granted, we're hardly fantastic about getting stuff posted up here every single day, but we don't generally go more than a day or two without delivering something to the slavering masses.

(bnotd monday: the slavering masses, a group of slavic working-class rockers. yeah, we've got nothing today)(we'll get to sunday later)

Anyhow, Saturday involved, um, not much really. Sunday involved more not much, and then a bit of a reunion with some of the Warped House. While good friends, those reuniting never actually lived in the house at the same time. Nevertheless, good times were had, drinks were drunk, and games were played- specifically, and interesting thing called Arkham Horror. It's a long, confusing, complicated game taking place entirely within the Lovecraft-brand of warped horror, and this leads us to the BNOTD for Sunday night:

Arkham Bafflement, which is naturally a Steampunk band (like Abney Park, but not much like Daft Punk), complete with ruffled shirts and strangely glazed looks.

Anyhow, moving right along into Monday, we had:

The Slavering Masses, the aforementioned band of immigrant rock and roll, which leaves us with today.

Today. Ah, yes, today. See, one of the BNOTD  staff (in fact, the one writing this post) has a degree in English (Ed: this is why I do all the writing). Every time said English major makes any sort of typo, the gang (and we do mean "gang!") of friends jumps all over him in gibbering glee to point out the mistake. Occasionally, this makes for truly epic band names. Like today:

Peace Corpse, which is a hoodoo-influenced hippie band from New Orleans. They're like the Grateful Dead, but a bit more dead than grateful.

Farstucker

Some days, we just need to be rude here on Band Name Of The Day. Not because we're actively trying to promote an atmosphere of hostility, or of tasteless jerkiness, but just because that's the sort of folks we are.

Not everyone in this world is squeaky clean, thoughtful and believes that the way to a better planet is by offending nobody. Some of us know that it's important to get along with our fellow humans, but it's also important to push the envelope a bit, to open people's minds to other options. Put enough ideas in someone's head, and their mind will expand whether they like it or not. All of a sudden, things that used to be utterly alien to them and shocked them nigh unto death are suddenly just a bit eccentric. Hell, look at earrings! It used to be that only sailors and carnies wore an earring, but these days nobody blinks if a man's got a brass hoop through his earlobe.

We're not the only people in the world who think like, this, and this leads us to our Band Name Of The Day:

Shredded Clitoris, which is an all-grrl gutter punk group from nitty gritty old London. They know that the world benefits from the occasional shock, and that the mere mention of things will bring them into the mainstream. So far from being some sort of ultra violent, misogynistic bunch of sociopathic sadists, the members of this band are loud, screeching, feminists who change the world in a better way inch by painful inch.

Finally, we'd like to close by saying that this band name was proposed to us by a regular reader who has asked to remain anonymous. Nevertheless, we'd like to say thank you for a chance to spout off a bit of our immature amateur philosophy.

No More Mr. Clean

Well, ladies and gentlemen of the press, it's another Friday night, and that means it's time to find a bar clean the house to prepare for the weekend! We're not huge fans of cleaning here at Band Name Of The Day, although we fully admit to the usefulness of clean sheets, especially vis a vis "editing" the cleanliness of said sheets.

*ahem*

Anyhow, we've got another BNOTD out of Oakland today, courtesy of the housemate of yesterday's BNOTD! This one, oddly enough, came about at her job at a major national corporation. Not the sort of thing that would normally condone this blog, but it seems the employees have been enjoying it in a sort of quiet revolt. We approve of this. They came up with:

Lysol Bomb. They add that it's Either a grunge band, or little old lady christian ballad folk rock. We're not sure about that, but this is another one of those great band names that hasn't been taken*, so please, feel free to use it! In fact, if you do, we'll absolutely link to you!


*as far as we know, and we know only what we can establish with less than ten seconds worth of googling.