February 22, 2014

I'm starting a movement: Keep Snow in the Mountains Where It Belongs! After a brief, rebellious flurry this morning, the weather seems to be listening. Because we don't want people stuck indoors when they could go out to hear:

Aufblasbar Frau
Translate silly things into German and they sound serious . . . or silly in a whole different way. (I had to look it up. It means "Inflatable Woman.")

Breaks and Swells
In our maritime region, how many words are there for waves? These are also musical terms, or they could refer to the kind of injuries you might sustain in a mosh pit. Then again, swells might be hipsters catching a break. Well played, friends.

P:E-O/P;L,E 
Last week I asked for more punctuation, and look what I get! Gee, I wish there was more money in blogging about band names . . .

Wynne C. Blue and Her Troublefakers
The fun you can have by changing one letter! Is this anything like crying wolf?

Yes Bear
And then sometimes a name comes along that gets in for reasons of pure personal nostalgia. An extremely long time ago, when I was a child, we lived out in the sticks, and we took our bulky, unburnable trash to the dump. The dump was a place where you could poke around and sometimes find treasures. When I was about 5, my older sister adopted a stuffed panda from the dump. She named it Yes Bear and it could say only one word: Yes. It was unbelievably annoying, even (or especially) to a little sister, and it hung around for years. (As a side note, at this time I had a much more dump-worthy stuffed animal that I had inherited from our older brother. It had neither ears nor eyes nor tail, but they told me it was a rabbit. Its multisyllabic unspellable nonsense name would have made a great band name, if only I could remember it.) Thanks for the memories, Yes Bear.

The rabbit, on right, before it was dump-worthy

Me and the Yes Bear

February 15, 2014

It's that weird time of year when we've just had snow but it's starting to look and feel like spring; when Seattle high schoolers, two weeks into a new semester, take a week off to recover; when the year no longer feels new but I still have to think before writing the date. On the upside, a Monday holiday offers the rare opportunity to go out on a Sunday night! Make the most of it.

BowieVision
This technological marvel brought to you by Ziggy Stardust. Always in style.

(he thinks he's people)
Why do I assume this is aimed at the drummer? (I also like the parentheses. There's generally not enough punctuation in band names.)

Hoax Foot
I read this as a translation of pseudopod, a favorite term from high school biology. (In what I understand is their first outing, this duo is playing on the aforementioned Sunday night on a bill with former Square Pig honorees Pouch and Canals of Venice. Enjoyed a solo set by one of the members last summer, so I'm looking forward to it!)

Propagandhi
Excellent name pun! Politically slanted promotion of non-violent resistance -- what's not to like?

Slutever
So appropriate that they played on Valentine's Day!

February 8, 2014

I've been thinking this week about Seattle's relationship to noise. We are famously polite, self-effacing, and law-abiding. Yet we're also famous for jets, rock bands, and seismic sports fans. Hmm. Perhaps because we are so polite and self-effacing . . .

Here are some noisemakers whose names caught my eye:

The Anti-Job
The pay stinks, but at least the hours are bad.

Brother Inferior
And now to St. Grunge's Monastery for a clever example of our famous loser mentality.
 
Can of Beans
A can of worms is what you don't want to open up; a hill of beans is what it doesn't amount to. If you open up a can of beans, you just get dinner. I don't even want to think about a hill of worms, though that would amount to a good band name.

Colonels of Truth
. . . and their nemeses, the Lieutenants of Lies! As noted previously, I'm fond of homophones that are spelled so differently that you have to read them aloud to get the pun.
 
Stars at Your Feet
A startling and striking image. On a personal note, I used this very phrasing in a science fiction story, in which a filmmaker on EVA is allowed to float away from the spaceship in order to get his shot.

 

February 1, 2014

Funny -- the Times lists no rock shows on Sunday. Must be something else going on . . . The rest of the week makes up for it, and these bands rose to the top:

Basic Vacation
Like garage rock -- no frills, maybe even in your own home, but refreshing and restoring.

Boomstick
Although I am a drummer myself, I'm willing to allow this to mean a loud electric guitar.

Clear Plastic Masks
I like the idea of masks that don't obscure anything, somehow hiding behind transparency.

Dawn of Midi
It seems like a long time ago now, but at the time, it felt like the present.

The Wild Snohomians
The surprise here is that in 4+ years of blogging, I haven't included this outfit. I'm sure they've made the short list at least once, so here they are at last. This would seem to be a marriage of wild and mild. However, the trip to Snohomish is always enough longer than we think it should be to qualify the place as wilderness.

(Oh, all right. Go Hawks!)