Sandwiches are hiding something, says Badenoch

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Vampire Weekend, and other titillating band names that hide how boring they are

THESE enigmatic band names promise exciting and mysterious things, but unfortunately are just masking how dull the music actually is. Be quickly disappointed by these artists:

Vampire Weekend

These preppy Peter Pan lookalikes don’t really suck virgins dry during blood-drenched orgies of an evening, preferring instead to make tunes for holiday adverts. You’ll instantly recognise their annoyingly repetitive jingle A-Punk, and this is as good as it gets, unless you’re a fan of vacuous tunes about Cape Cod sung by a group of college inbetweeners claiming to be influenced by world music, which Paul Simon already bored everyone with in the 80s. 

Tangerine Dream

You may well have wondered what a tangerine dream is. Or, after listening to them, what the point of Krautrock – ‘kosmische Musik’ for terminal musos – is, apart from allowing guys to dick around with keyboards. It turns out Tangerine Dream comes from a misunderstanding of a Beatles lyric, when band founder Edgar Froese thought ‘tangerine trees’ meant ‘tangerine dreams’. Somehow that boring and irrelevant origin story feels strangely apt.

Death Cab for Cutie

The name suggests some sort of thrilling Sin City-style gothic/noir crossover. It’s really not. Ben Gibbard’s band leaned into the banal side of being a weepy teenager, with its tinkling plucked guitars and piano ballads and lyrics reading like diary entries about being picked on by the school bully. The name comes from a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band track, which isn’t a great idea unless you’re eager to look tame by comparison.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Despite provocative political statements, zombie film scores, and album titles about the Devil and piss raining from the skies, there’s not a single song by this troupe that isn’t a complete chore. Tracks can be eight minutes or 20, often including faint whispers of people mumbling or a recording of a literal empty field. They reach crescendos sometimes, you just have to endure repetitive loops, the odd cymbal splash, and a heap of pretentiousness to get there. 

Barenaked Ladies

This Canadian band were probably not in fact inundated with barenaked ladies, due to writing studiedly nerdy songs featuring bongos, bad rapping and an explanation of Big Bang Theory on a track used as the sitcom’s theme song. It’s hard to think of anything less appealing than sitting through an am dram group’s vocal warmup, which is the entirety of their main hit One Week. It’s the epitome of 90s zaniness that has only become more tiresome as the long years have dragged on.

Sunn 0)))

Sunn 0))) are best seen live to witness how millennia of music development can be reduced to nothing in the space of an hour. Obscured by smoke, you have the pleasure of hearing robed blokes play one note for minutes on end, enjoyed a bit too fondly by their fans who prefer bodily vibrations over decent tunes. To be fair, the band name makes it fairly clear you’re getting experimental amplified vibey stuff, but no one would think that was all they planned to do.