Sparky's Lust Muffin

The plaintive wail of the long-haul trucker singing softly along with the radio as his big rig speeds out of control down a fog-covered mountain, this is the aesthetic of Sparky's Love Muffin. Folk blues with raunchy but good natured bite.

Yosepef

Billed as Slovakia's answer to Bob Dylan, this rather bold claim is, in fact, a rather presumptous and unfair comparison made mostly out of a combination of wishful thinking and bad billing. While Dylan was a genuine lyrical genius songwriter with an often biting wit, Yosepef's lilting folk and lush fingerpicking seems rather subdued by contrast. For the Western release of his first extended player, the artist was forced to learn English phonetically in a mere four days, and the result produced is a a kind of off-kilter, awkward delivery that only accentuates the strangeness of the music.

Yosepef Norageniskal's breezy, albeit heavily accented voice embraces the starry-eyed optimism and lushly ornate sound that characterizes a warm summer's day. Either that, or a soundtrack to an animated children's film from the 1960's.

With the hit singles, "Flowers in the Upside-Down Breeze", "A Cloak of Velvet Twilight", and "Embracing Your Vegetable Spirit", the album found a cult audience in Portland and Eugene, Oregon, but flopped massively in the rest of the United States, and for that matter, the rest of the English speaking world.

Joseph Pendelton's Beefeater Band featuring Morgan Graflington

The world's first prog rock/polka hybrid band incorporates state-of-the-art sound effects with a dose of good old fashioned accordion-driven auditory spectacle. One could never accuse the group of aiming low, as evidenced by a multitude of sweeping concert length songs that often pass the ten minute mark. Lead gutarist Graflington is kept busy for the majority of the show, standing behind a small tower of computers that produce the sonic backdrop upon which the sprawling accordion solos, the band's trademark, are built.

With song titles like "Twenty-Third Century Centaur" and "Eleven Hundred Woodchucks Baked in a Pie", the band revels in deliberately verbose titles, having never met an adjective, nor a noun it didn't like. Album covers are produced by the band's drummer, who took a class in collage art at a community college. Said community college happens to also be the location by which the group found itself with an only slightly used and only slightly stolen timpani, which is used frequently and meant to add a symphonic sense of theatricality to the proceedings.

There's Always Room for Fail

Little can be said of a band that dedicates itself to the pursuit of suck. Their target fan base is fifteen years old, male, and unable to get a date. There's Always Room for Fail, or TARfF, is loud and obnoxious.

Big Glasses for Men with Big Heads

Snarky, silly, and savvy in the spirit of acts like Spin Doctors and They Might Be Giants, Big Glasses for Men with Big Heads sing quasi-meaningful ballads about topics as diverse as fishing, the age of dinosaurs, the lymphatic system, and hydrogen bonds.

Drinundel

This vaguely Scandinavian sounding band caters to the Renaissance Fair attending crowd. If you're the sort of person likely to concoct a pseudonym for yourself that sounds mysteriously foreboding while at the same time exceptionally geeky, Drinundel are the group for you.

So, Lord Belvedere, and Lady Portutia, party like it's 1599, and in the process don't forget to talk loudly about your strongly-held opinions regarding The Lord of the Ring trilogy and your recent command of Middle English. If you'd have liked to live in a world of mead, chivalry, and ill-fitting tunics, then congratulations, you've found your element. If you've always wanted to wear a pompadour, ladies, then welcome to the club. If you break the ice by referring to the Red Dwarf convention you attended four years ago, you will fit in well.

Most of the women in attendance are exceptionally overweight and at least superficially Wiccan in spiritual beliefs. Men grow their hair down to shoulder length and wax poetically about their authentic period facial hair. If you like singing antiquated drinking songs, most of which are either Irish, Scottish, or English in origin, and make no pretense of concealing a puerile sense of toilet humor, this is your crowd.

Nuclear Holocaustic Bloodbath

...or, in short, hardcore death metal at its most amateurish.

Four sixteen-year-olds, garbed in black and wearing Hot Topic finery, hail from a small southern town. During performances, the guitarists crank up the distortion and their $800 effects pedals to disguise a lack of authenticity or anything remotely resembling actual talent. Each song utilizes the same four power chords, though they are in the process of learning a fifth, and soon hope to incorporate this technical innovation into their songwriting canon.

Nuclear Holocaustic Bloodbath are beloved by their fan base of heavily tatted, pierced, and often drug addicted young women, several of whom became pregnant in their late teens. These unfortunate misfit groupies openly and quite fashionably shirk their parental responsibility by effectively handing their unwanted children over to long-suffering parents, in effect freeing themselves up to attend concerts and to live a life of cheerful hedonism.

Group members came up with their name one study hall, after finishing a spades tournament. It was agreed by consensus vote that the name sounded "scary enough, but not too scary".

The primary songwriters work a grueling shift at a convenience store back home, and dream of being a superstar. Each will, after high school, secure a job as an electrician or plumber's assistant.

Impa'chillin

Just another chronic jam band playing interminable drum solos and long-winded guitar riffs with the occasional catchy lyric. Basic background noise when you're sober, increasingly cosmically amazing the more the listener alters his or her consciousness.

The Dune Buggies

A Neil Young cover band, The Dune Buggies explore the exact point at which good intentions and minimal talent meet.

Comprised of four music geeks, TDB, as they are affectionately known by their legion of approximately twelve fans, often play college towns in Ohio somewhere in the neighborhood of around eight in the evening. Despite the fact that the only people in a smoky-dive bar at eight o'clock are either a) hard-core alcoholics or b) the girlfriends of group members, this matters little to them.

As an aside, they are routinely beaten at local Battle of the Bands competitions by a woman named Carla who plays the spoons.

Everybody Loves Wang

Family-friendly and folksy, Wang plays guitar, harmonica, and kazoo, and shares the stage with children's choirs and soft-rock combos. Peter, Paul, and Mary meet Raffi, if Raffi were Chinese.

The Bee's Knees

This Twenties revival band is one part Dixieland Jazz, and two parts vintage clothing. Members play period instruments: a decrepit banjo, a dusty trombone, a decaying piano long out of tune, and a scuffed up trumpet. They have to be extremely careful not to overdo it, else the nearly eighty-five year old museum pieces fall apart in front of the audience. Priding themselves on a combination of purity and minimalism, they simply can't dance the Charleston in clothing that old, else their broad-brimmed cloches or ties that resemble an egg in the stages of scrambling crumble into dust or bust seams.

Women wear floor length raccoon coats that shed like crazy and scatter the front rows with fluff. Men slick their hair back and stride with faux confidence back and forth across the length of the stage, projecting an air of ridiculous optimism common only to the period.

Malicious Poetry

One of those haunting punk acts whose angry, percussive rage punctures your senses, leaving behind the empty holes of ghostly recognition that allow their subtle lyrics to blow through your spirit as if it were a pan pipe.

GlauPunk

At first glance GlauPunk is a disturbing mix of french bar music and german hard core punk. At second glance they are just as disturbing. Fortunatly for listeners, that garbled mish mash of syllables and sounds is not actually any specific language, therefore they are unlikely to actually offend anyone. Well, not lyrically, anyway.

Short White People

Looks like emo, sounds like ska, this is a band of contradictions. Although the drummer is only 5'4", she is a woman of color, and the rest of the band are of average or above-average height. Short white people produces great dance music with funny lyrics about topics such as road trips where nobody has a map or gas money or taking small children apple-picking.