#100DaysOfBandNames

New fake band art everyday for 100 days #100DayChallenge Design - Ryan Mowery Album Reviews - Donald Carson

[100daysofbandnames]

100/100 Dicky Ticker and the Heart Attacks

“Chest Pain Records has released a new collection of one of the most under-appreciated Doo-Wop acts of the mid 20th century. In his day, Richard “Dicky” Ticker and his band were mildly famous, but sadly now they’re almost unheard-of. Consisting of Dicky and four bandmates — Xavier “Fat” Teague, Beck Paine, and Cole Sweat — The Heart Attacks even got a hit on the Billboard Top 100 in 1955, right at the 100th spot. You may have heard Heart for Love playing in an elevator once:

I’ve got a heart for love /Not just for pumping blood /And when I’m feelin’ great /It helps my love to circulate /

In his later years, Dicky and crew made it their mission to bring Doo-Wop to nursing homes, traveling to all 50 states each year to brighten the days of those who still remembered their era of music. Eventually band members started passing away, until it was just Dicky singing along to pre-recorded tracks of his three former bandmates. Ironically — or whatever the right word is — Dicky died in his sleep last year at the ripe old age of 94. Turns out his ticker worked just fine.”

— Enzo Montefiore, Rolling Stone

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99/100 Unicorgy

“Some people pronounce it ‘YOO-nuh-corg-ee’ as in the dog,” lead singer Trip Whipple says. ‘But you spell the dog with an “I.” It’s clearly ‘Yoo-nuh-COR-jee.’” Lowering his voice theatrically, he leans forward and says ‘A group of unicorns is called an “orgy.” That’s where we got the name.’ This isn’t really the discussion I wanted to have, so I quickly pivot to the band’s music, which sounds like heavy metal written for and by kindergarteners. ‘Actually we do get a lot of ideas from our kids,’ co-founder Mish Jeramio says. ‘Some of the stuff they bring home from school is brilliant.’ Whipple wags a finger at my skeptical expression. ‘John Lennon was hugely inspired by his children,’ he says. What I want to say (but don’t) is that Lennon was a genius, and Whipple, Jeremio & Co are most assuredly not.”

— Baraz Darzi, themusiccurmugeon.com

3D render by Cole Reed

[100daysofbandnames]

98/100 Tripping Over Leashes

“‘Yeah, we’re dog people,’ confess Lynn and Joe Drumheller. ‘It’s a Portland thing.’ Tripping Over Leashes was created right here in Portland, Oregon, when Lynn (formerly the lead singer of Baked Gods) and Joe, founder of Unpugged) got together. Leaving their former bands, they began to perform together — and co-parent their pack of dogs. ‘I brought three dogs to the relationship and he brought two,’ Lynn says. ‘It’s a lot. Every time a package is delivered to the front porch there’s a frenzy of barking ranging from the roar of the Great Dane through the midtones of the Labs to to the high-pitched Pugs and Chihuahuas.’ Adds Joe, ‘They’ve ruined so many home studio recording sessions. But they’re our muses, so we can’t be too hard on them.’ I’ve grown a bit tired of reflective acoustic guitar music about middle-class identity problems delivered in wispy vocals, but as a dog dad myself, TOL has reinvigorated the genre for me. I especially liked the the occasional background howling they’ve left in.”

— Anson Kemp, Willamette Week

[100daysofbandnames]

97/100 merriam webstered

“Billing itself as ‘Instrumentals and Acapellas,’ the musical group Merriam Webstered has released a soundscape like none I’ve heard before. Using the human voice as an instrument, the group weaves voices and instruments together in what they assure me is completely non-synthesizer-assisted ways. It feels like they’ve spent a lot of time mixing the tracks, but no — they tell me they were all recorded in locations that were ‘acoustically interesting’ to get the echoes and reverb effects. Be that as it may, I’m enchanted by this amazing opus. If you’re into ethereal ambience (but not synths), listen to this album to see how it’s done.”

— Rhodri Rhydderch, The Guardian

[100daysofbandnames]

96/100 Kimo Kawaii

“It means ‘cute and gross’ in Japanese, but if you’re looking for the gross, you’ll need to understand Japanese to find it on this band’s eponymous album, its fifth since 2011. Otherwise you’ll think Kimo Kawaii is all cute. The band’s five members wear enchanting pink and white outfits and sing with captivating monster headpieces that conceal their identity. It’s all mesmerizingly adorable. Translating the lyrics, however, you’ll realize the songs are super gross (and don’t get me started thinking about how much they must sweat under those masks). With tracks like Brain Worm, Stomach Exploder, No Parachute Big Problem and Dinner or Autopsy? — well, you get the idea. Well done, Kimo Kawaii. I’m going to need to listen to a lot of Babymetal to get your gross songs out of my head.”

— Midori Saito, Eye-Ai

[100daysofbandnames]

95/100 Damn the tomatoes

“Damn the Tomatoes, has done for vegetables what Angry Birds has done for the avian world — absolutely nothing. But it is an entertaining iOS game, and it has its own soundtrack. Unlike Angry Birds, it doesn’t yet have its own movie, and the soundtrack is all instrumental, devoid of any pop stars, and produced in conjunction with the Symphony of Southwest Arkansas. For fans of the original Damn the Tomatoes theme song, so catchy it’s probably going through your head right now, the original track is included at the end. You’re probably just better off pulling out your iPhone and playing a few levels. But hey, good try Tomato Lobby.”

— Creed Saint Bowie, cnet.com

[100daysofbandnames]

94/100 Deep Fakes

“Like Daft Punk, Deep Fakes took their name from a review of their music. ‘They’re fakes, but they’re such deep fakes you don’t mind it,’ laughingly quotes Marisol De León, one half of the group (‘the deep one,’ she tells me). Fusing the much-beloved Mexican Norteño music with techno, the band speeds it up a bit to create a modern yet traditional sound. ‘It’s not Nortec, though,’ De León hastens to tell me. ‘It’s our own thing. And we keep the vocals.’ Thought it’s hard to imagine an audience for Deep Fake’s often 10 to 15-minute tracks, co-founder Adela Vásquez (‘the fake one,’ she tells me) claims they have a large following in Mexico and elsewhere in South America. ‘We’re huge in Buenos Aires,’ Váquez says. ‘We don’t really know why.’ 

— Véronica Pérez, urbanlatino.com

[100daysofbandnames]

93/100 Tall Orange

“A mysterious collaboration of uncredited (and therefore likely high-profile) musical artists has produced this project, Tall Orange, which takes a certain Politician Who Must Not Be Named to pieces in just 10 tracks. Though we’ve already seen a bushel of these types of artistic endeavors, this one deserves special mention just because it’s actually fun, listenable music as well. Imagine yourself bopping along to the title gem, Tall Orange (or, The Return of Taxes): Like a book that should be published / Like a song that should be sung / We need to see those documents / To heal where we’ve been stung / Let us heal, Tall Orange / Let us heal, Tall Orange / Let us heal, Tall Orange / Let us heal, Tall Orange / Orange you glad I didn’t say that again / It’s likely that even a decade in the future none of us will remember the immediacy of the topics each track covers, but at the present moment the time is ripe.” 

— Corey Appleton, The Hill Music

[100daysofbandnames]

92/100 it's not me its ewe

“German rocker Uwe Dittmar has, apparently just for die Hölle of it, released an album for the US market. Correctly foreseeing the difficulty Americans would have pronouncing his name, he’s entitled his project It’s Not Me It’s Ewe. Just exactly how this will help his cause is uncertain, since Uwe (pronounced OO-vuh for the Americans Dittmar was concerned about) is a far cry from Ewe. Certainly a good decision he made was to team up with American rapper I M Sexxxy (‘The third X is silent,’ she tells me) who delivers Dittmar’s so-so lyrics with such confidence and poise that it certainly rescues this otherwise puzzlingly unasked-for album from certain obscurity — and elevates her career. Of course, if you’ve ever heard Dittmar’s singing voice, you’re doubly grateful.” 

— Saskia Jäger, Rolling Stone

[100daysofbandnames]

91/100 Soft Stanley

“Sax virtuoso Stanley Washington wants you to know he can do soft jazz, too. Coming on the heels of a set of experimental albums — Flat Stanley, where he doctored his instrument so that certain notes were slightly out of tune, and is pretty much unlistenable if you have any ear for pitch; the unfortunately named Hard Stanley, where he rocked us as indicated with hits from the 1970s; and perhaps the most interesting of them all, Daft Stanley, where he played all Daft Punk covers — Soft Stanley is a refreshing treat, and will likely sell more units than all his other albums combined. He’s undeniably talented, and I for one am glad he’s finally using his talents for good.” 

— Grier Thorburn, JazzTimes

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90/100 Lets Make Bread

‘Swiss band Let’s Make Bread refuses to choose a genre. Rap, reggae, rock — there’s even a polka on their latest album, though it’s definitely not your parents’ polka. While I admire their, erm, flexibility, it does make sitting down to take in this album from start to finish rather like dancing to a DJ who hasn’t read the room and insists on slowing things down when everyone has reached a fever pitch of energy and speeding things up when everyone’s exhausted. It sort of makes you wish they’d just settle down — or at least release an album where all the songs feel like they’re in the same family at least.’ 

— Nora Preston Siddall, The Guardian

[100daysofbandnames]

89/100 die of dysentery

“I wrote a long and involved review of Die of Dysentery’s latest album. It had footnotes and cross-references. And then I somehow deleted it. I didn’t think it was possible to lose writing in this day and age of cloud backups, but there you are. Then I realized it was a perfect setup for a (shorter) review of the album where I admitted that I had to write a new one because my old one didn’t survive. Suffice it to say that DOD’s clever concept album, where they take imaginary characters from the beloved MECC game and tell their stories in each track, is worth a listen. I enjoyed the album, even though my original review didn’t make it.” 

— Dan Acquarone, Portland Mercury

[100daysofbandnames]

88/100 “Disaster a la Mode”

“Imagine five white boys singing in Chinese. Now desperately try to forget what you’ve just conjured up. Unfortunately, you can’t, because you’ve just listened to the first (and hopefully last) album from Disaster a la Mode. It’s a cool idea in theory, and you can almost picture yourself in the room when they decided to give it a try. ‘All these artists from other countries sing in English,’ you can hear them saying. ‘Why don’t we return the favor?’ Unfortunately, Mandarin is just too difficult a language to take lightly. I’m fluent in it and in many cases I had to look up the band’s lyrics online to figure out what the hell they were saying. I think they must’ve used Google Translate, too, because some of what they’re singing doesn’t make sense even poetically. In the end, perhaps Disaster a la Mode’s crime isn’t butchering a beautiful language, but that they don’t seem to have involved even one native speaker in their project. The album’s nice-looking, though. Maybe buy the record, toss out the disc, and frame the cover.” 

— Qiang Roberson, NPR Music

[100daysofbandnames]

87/100 album art for the fake band “Termites of tribulation”

“Lead singer Ferd Melchisidek named his band after a traumatic moment involving a termite nest falling into his face while he was remodeling his house. His music echoes this experience, but not in a good way. No earworms here — the album is hard listening. You desperately want to like it, but in the end it feels immature. I can best describe the sound as a group of teenage boys working out their issues by playing heavy metal in their parents’ garage while the entire neighborhood contemplates calling the cops.” 

— Vladan Ryba, decibelmagazine.com

[100daysofbandnames]

86/100 Yield under your hands

“YUYH wants to be so much, but in the end, I fear it rings a bit hollow. The conceptual grandchild of Enigma (remember them?) it combines mysticism, secret societies, ancient manuscripts, and half-whispered secrets into … well, not much. Alas, its energies are too scattered to successfully repeat the kind of intrigue and success Enigma created.” 

— Eugene Soo, quickmusicreviews.com

[100daysofbandnames]

85/100 Animal Hammock

“What happens when Danielle Kim of Sudden Cat and Georgina Roxbury of Casual Ferret Fridays collaborate on a project? Animal Hammock happens. The album is a high-energy hard-rocking celebration of all our favorite mammals. It’s pro-koala, pro-panda, pro-cat and yes, pro-ferret (listen to the track Not Ferret All if you have doubts).” 

— Jane Mah, quickmusicreviews.com

[100daysofbandnames]

84/100 Recipe for Disaster

“8-bit video game-based movie Recipe for Disaster has a 16-bit soundtrack. Contradiction in terms? Not really. Both the movie and the soundtrack are a joyful potpourri of everything nostalgic about the computers some of us older folks grew up with — and that the younger generation are rediscovering in the form of Minecraft and other pixellated joys (Side note: my nephew still hasn’t forgiven me for calling it ‘Mindcrap’). Sega fans rejoice. My only caution is that an hour of this simplistic music, no matter how expertly mixed, is a bit much. But you can decide that for yourself.” 

— Arvind Melwani,