Faux Paus

Brutal honesty is the calling card of this group as is a revealing kind of self-deprecating humor. Some might assume it's done in fun, as some kind of post-modern critique, but since they're a bit on the simple side, don't give them more credit than they're due.

A running joke revolves around the band's album and single titles, which are almost always an exercise in face value judgments---or to put it another way, what you see is exactly what you get. For example, Faux Paus' debut album was named Please Don't Judge Us Too Harshly, which was then followed six months later by Not Quite as Bad as the Last One. The group's first introduction to the charts was, appropriately enough a single called "We're Getting There, I Swear."

The latest effort reveals the frustration within the group, titled Never Going to Work Out. The lead-off single is called "Creative and Artistic Differences", backed with "Ego Problems".

The Eisenwerk Orchestra of Power

Three German computer geeks set forward their sincere, yet nonetheless awkward synthesis of electronica and funk. Incorporating repetitive sampling with the booming brass sound of a live trombone and alto saxophone is no easy feat, and certainly beyond their combined limited musical talents. No one faults the group for the daring effort, but they simply aren't competent enough to pull off the endeavor.

Karl Reiss, the band's de facto leader, periodically switches back and forth from his console to strap on a fretless bass, laying forth a few mellow grooves, as the song demands. Most performances are punctuated by meaningful, but often incoherent vocalizing in English, clearly not the group's first language. What results is a kind of English/German hybrid that ironically is understood well by neither native English speakers, nor native German speakers.

Avoid at all costs.

Nickajack All-Stars

Attempting to expand country music to the latte drinking, yuppie set, Nickajack All-Stars certainly have their work cut out for them. The group suffers from a lack of hick cred among the traditional country music listening set and a total dearth of interest among hipsters and young professionals. With the support of the former, the band could play at the Grand Old Opry and be adored by pickup truck driving, tobacco chewing, blue-collar workers. With the support of the later, their twangy vocals and unusual lyrics could find a kind of irony-drenched popularity. Sadly, they fail on both counts.

Hits include, "The Blue Blue Sky of my Skye Skye Vodka", "My Prius Just Died", and "Whole Foods Blues."

Instantonitis

Geek rock at its finest. Each of the four members holds a phD from a prestigious Ivy League school and had every intention of ending up in a reputable profession, but found that music was a more lucrative endeavor. Their album The Hour of Not Quite Literature showcases the group's disarmingly simplistic interlocking keyboard, bass, rhythm guitar, and drum parts. Their tired take on roots rock shines through competently on exactly one song, which everyone in the audience calls for by name.

Aside from that, every song is in the one of the same three keys that guitarists find the least challenging. Despite this, the band scored an unexpected number fourteen hit in the charts with "Phonological and Lexical", a song that explores English grammatical terms. It was quickly latched onto by secondary school educators in an effort to try to seem hip while at the same time teaching high school students the beauty of adverbs, prepositions, and modifiers.

Sharpsburg Prairie Dog

Beloved among aging baby boomers, Garrison Keilor, and NPR listeners, Sharpsburg Prairie Dog's take on bluegrass utilizes two warbling female vocalists who sing carefully crafted high-harmony duets, an electrified banjo, a fiddle player, and a washboard bass. Although every song sounds completely identical to the one that came before, no one seems to notice or care.

Members of an Americana, back-to-basics music movement which makes no pretenses towards originality in songcraft or performance, Sharpsburg Prairie Dog instead tries to emulate early twentieth century folk and to sound exactly like Appalachian hillbilly music. The intent may have been to revisit a long forgotten musical form, whose original practitioners have long since passed away, but instead of pushing the genre forward, the result produced is a kind of willful inertia--each song part and parcel of an endlessly repetitive nostalgia piece that everyone professes their love for out of a desire to seem trendy and on the cutting edge, but no one really cares much for in reality. In reality, it's just white noise, albeit a trendy kind of white noise.

ElectroniK Meat Babies

Seamless melange of techno-grunge with a sexual edge. Volatile electronic beats, repetitive high-pitched lyrics, and revealing pleather jumpsuits form the backbone for non-stop retro fun.

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.