Who Are You?

City Paper wants to name your band.

by Ryan Godfrey

I really like the matching green Velcro jumpsuits. Fabulous look. The lead singer is not really my type, but totally hot. And that one song where the guitar just drips with harmonics and feedback and the drum track explodes like illegal fireworks -- wow. Your sound is noisy, oppressive and utterly capable of melting plastic surgery scars: I like that. I really have never heard such blistering twee. But can I be a little bit honest here? It¹s just that, at a deep and unforgiving level, your new band sucks hard.

It's the name. It's awful. Walk me through the thought process with this one, because I'm going to need some kind of documentation that you weren't collectively comatose when you came up with it. Do you really think anyone is going to want that inked into their butt?

The naming of bands is a difficult matter; it isn't just one of your holiday games. For this reason, City Paper is debuting a new online service, CP NameBrain -- dial it up at www.citypaper.net/namebrain -- to help you, the up-and-coming musical stylists of Generation Whatever-We're-Up-To, come up with the perfect name. Yes, it's highly kind of us, and you have every right to be grateful. But it's not entirely altruistic; if we're going to write about your new CD, it will help your cause oodles if we don't have to keep typing "Floatie 39," "Los Asswipes" or "Jessica Simpson." No fortified mouthwash is going to easily rid us of those sour tastes.

It's true that 17 percent of all Web pages are band-name generators. But, like your current band name, all of them suck hard. They take random words and combine them together and make you do the heavy lifting of actually deciding on a name. By contrast, NameBrain is all about quality, hand-tooled craftsmanship from the CP hive mind: several hundred instances of our nomination for The Perfect Unused Band Name, helpfully separated by musical genre. So take our names in vain, stencil one onto your amps and bass drums and remember us when you're rock gods.