Band Name Here

Interestingly enough, Band Name Here never tours. No one except a favored few have even ever seen their faces. They don't make music videos and they never give interviews. Given all that, it's a wonder they even make a living, right?

Wrong.

Having learned early that it doesn't matter how good you are if you can't market yourself effectively, from the very beginning Band Name Here sold their music to the programming departments of major national network television stations. In exchange, their music is featured prominently in the background of many sitcoms, though they are frequently uncredited for their efforts. The group writes songs specifically to fit the action and plot of the latest episode, no matter how banal, and make no effort whatsoever to sound fresh, exciting, or edgy. Instead they blatantly copy the elements of whatever song is selling well in the Top 40 and produce an exact facsimile. This saves the television studios large sum of money, since they're not obligated to pay royalty fees to the record labels of these currently popular bands. Though those with a sharp ear can easily tell the difference between cheap imitation and the genuine article, most people are too busy watching their program to notice much of a difference.

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.

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.

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.

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.