Howdy, fellow aficionados!

On this episode of the TNB, we’re on about family-oriented acts…

As in, family members in the same band! What could possibly go wrong?

Please bowl over your siblings to get to these here media controls!

You will also, of course, want to check the YT playlist to go with this episode!

AKA… audio footage found in a blood-spattered barn! #bogmonstermusic

Dan’s Notes

In the family: Favorite musical relatives

Nomeansno – Wright Brothers

A seminal western Canadian punk band who embraced the darker side of the sonic palate during their 25 or so year run, John (drums) and Rob (bass) mixed the Residents with Joy Division, jazz experimentation with thrash bombast alongside a variety of collaborators (and an occasional hockey-themed side endeavour). I feel Ike there is a time when young folks are first getting into “alternative” types of music where they will initially pick a bigger band from the past as an anchor point and kind of build their framework of taste from there, like “old school” punk forebears as astrological sign or Sex And The City character in some kind of alt-rock training wheels personality test or something, and Nomeansno were that band for me, I played bass (poorly) and love that their songs were arranged around Rob’s gnarling bass riffs rather than the power chord guitar focus of so many other bands of their era. They could still do power chords just fine and better than a lot of people, as evidenced by their Slap-Shot (the movie not the band) inspired side alter egos The Hanson Brothers. There was always something just ugly and nasty in the best way to their music, whether percussive polyrhythmic freak outs or haunting bass driven dirges, literally nobody did it quite like Nomeansno. I am so grateful that I was able to see them in all of their glory, including the Hanson Brothers drummer playing along with Jon for the main part of their set and a fulll Hansons set as an encore, as well as seeing a mesmerizing Rob Wright solo performance a few years later, and will always treasure their music, as nasty and misanthropic as it can be sometimes. I don’t need to sell you on Nomeansno, you already know you love them so you should just go check out one of their albums again as soon as you get the chance, you know?

His Hero Is Gone/Tragedy – Todd And Paul Burdette

Stalwarts of first the Memphis punk scene and later Portland Oregon, brother Todd and Paul Burdette had played in a variety of bands separately before starting His Hero in the mid 1990s. This band was seriously one of my absolute favorite bands during their brief three album run. Like, I seriously wore one of their shirts until it rotted off my body during my early 20’s extreme dirtbag era. Of course when I bought their debut “Thirteen Counts Of Arson” I didn’t realize it was a 45 RPM record and felt a little intimidated by what seemed almost too gutturally heavy until I put it on the right speed and then was blown away by their mix of anger, melody, and sheer heaviness anchored by Todd’s impassioned growls and ripping guitar riffs over Paul’s thunderous drums. After a couple of years of HHIG the brothers also started side project Deathreat (not to be confused with the similarly named Death Threat, a side project from some of the Hatebreed folks active around the same time) where Paul got to sing while his brother took over drumming duties. When His Hero called it quits following the departure of bassist Carl Auge in 1999, the remaining three members of the band (including both Burdette brothers and guitarist Yannick Lorrain whose praises I have sung on the show previously) reformed as Tragedy, blending a little classic 80’s hardcore-style seasoning into the mix that birthed the unfortunate genre descriptor of “Stadium Crust” to their sound, due to the big epic chords and dramatic dynamics of their songs especially in comparison with the three chord protoceratops bombast of so many of their compatriots. What can I say, HHIG were one of my absolute favorite bands for a good part of my early life so of course the brothers at the centre of it all had to be included on my list.

Waxahatchee/Swearin

Siblings Alison and Katie Crutchfield started out in Alabama pop punkers PS Eliot in the late 00’s/early 2010s before becoming disillusioned with that end of the scene and the crappy macho attitudes and general bad vibes they ran into during that band’s run. Katie released her first album under the Waxahatchee moniker, American Weekend was released in 2012. The same year, Katie’s sister Allison and her Philly-based pop punk/alt-rock unit Swearin’ also released their self-titled debut. Waxahatchee have risen from folk-punk side project to one of the biggest artists in that realm where indie rock meets rootsy Americana over the course of the half-dozen or so full lengths between American Weekend, and her latest release, 2024’s Tiger’s Blood. Like “late night talk show musical guest” level big. Swearin’ had a few more stumbles along the way while still among some great music. They released their sophomore album Surfin Strange in 2013, and then after the next year took a couple of years off while sorting out some interpersonal stuff between band mates, reforming in 2017 and releasing their third album Fall Into The Sun in 2018.

I was even lucky enough to see Swearn twice over the years, once in the back of a weird vintage curio shop and once at Toronto’s famed Horsehoe Tavern. While Alison’s Swearin sound might hew a little closer to the pop punk end of things compared to Katie’s Waxahatchee work, both siblings have stayed close and even appeared on each other’s projects over the years and both write some pretty great songs in their respective styles so I had to include them on my list.

The Breeders! – Kim/Kelly Deal

Not originally a family act, The Breeders started out as a supergroup made up of The Pixies’ Kim Deal, Belly’s Tanya Donnelly and Slint’s Britt Walford, by their second album the true core of Kim and identical twin sister Kelly Deal came together in time for their breakout Last Splash LP. “Cannonball” was one of the earliest songs I ever tried learning my ear on bass thanks to that distinctive opening riff that just crawls into your ear and just won’t leave. The band’s runaway success led to a hiatus in 1994 while both Deal sister sought treatment for substance issues but the band got back together towards the turn of the millennium with a new lineup and released the follow up to Last Splash in 2002, Title TK. they released one more albumin 2008 under that incarnation and then reunited with the lineup of the band circa Last Splash for a 20th anniversary tour celebrating that album, which is the version of the band that still plays around currently. While they only released a couple of albums initially, and technically with two very different versions of the band between their first and second albums, but for just a minute, The Breeders felt like one of the biggest bands going in that 90’s alt rock scene. Hell, even Kurt Cobain was a fan. That’s why I thought it was pretty cool to see recently that the chart-topping young pop singer Olivia Rodrigo personally asked the band to open for her at Madison Square Garden this year as they were apparently one of her favorite bands growing up. For their sheer impact over the course of just a couple of records I figured I’d have to mention them (oh yeah and there is Kim’s whole thing with that other band of hers you might have heard of as well, but we can save them for another show.

Colin and Taylor Young – Twitching Tongues/Gods Hate/Deadfuckingbody

These are a couple of younger Southern California dudes who I feel like needed a mention due to their influence together and individually on the modern hardcore scene. Colin and Taylor Young first really made an impact on the scene in their heavy hardcore-adjacent metal band Twitching Tongues whose first album Sleep Therapy came out in 2012. There are a certain kind of dude that you will find in the HC scenes who is not happy unless they have a million different side projects on the go at once, and the brothers Young are definitely of that ilk. They moved on to start Gods Hate afterward on more of a straight up “break your nose in the pit” sort of hardcore end of things, who I’ve talked about on the show before due to their vocalist’s other career as a professional wrestler. After GH made a huge splash at hardcore fests around North America, the brothers started their more death metal oriented Deadfuckingbody project to work on the more technical end of their riffage, not to mention Twitching Tongues reuniting over the past couple of years as well, and their many individual music-related endeavours. HTaylor has made his name as an esteemed producer for records by artists ranging from MSPaint to Xibalba, and Colin has not only composed multiple entrance themes for pro wrestlers on the AEW roster, he also co hosts the popular Hardlore and tends to just kind of pop up everywhere these days. These guys seem like some ambitious and talented young dudes who alsways have a ton of projects going on so I figured they definitely deserved a mention.

Matt’s Notes

Let me thank Dan again, as I did in this space last time, for choosing a topic that is pretty easy to populate… in fact, trying to limit this to six or seven artists was somewhat of a challenge… like actually REALLY a challenge…

It turns out family and rock music goes together like Texas and cannibalism…I mean like generational poverty and class exploitation… I mean, uh…

You think your people are better than mine? Why don’t you come over here and say that!

*Sir, this is a Wendy’s*

ANYWAY…

The National

As mentioned during the recording, I really dig the National! Who are uh… two sets of brothers, one of them being twins… and then Matt, the singer… which for siblingdom gets even weirder!

Boxer, High Violet, and Trouble Will Find Me are all, for me, perfect albums! Not one skippable song in the lot! You can also make a strong case for Alligator as having some of the smartest, darkest, most awkward sad bastard pop songs of the mid-00’s!

Anybody who loves indie rock and Spın̈al Tap… which should be all of you!… will enjoy the Mistaken For Strangers film about the National… by Matt Berninger’s somewhat… uh… Lebowski-esque filmmaker brother… or rather his attempt to make a documentary about the National…

To paraphrase Wayne’s World… you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl!

The Replacements

I’m including the ‘Mats here simply because without the Brothers Stinson we have no indie or alternative music as we know it… the entire trajectory of popular music becomes questionable… unmoored from its tether…

The word is, and by “word” I mean “unsourced commentary on rock websites from some years back”, Kurt C named the second Nirvana LP after one of the tracks on Pleased to Meet Me… and to go deeper into the ‘Mats lore than anyone wanted… as per Westerberg, the song in question is a response to his feelings about Bob Stinson… fired for many, many things in a band used to going far beyond driven…

What we’ve learned from Bob Mehr’s brilliant, no-stone-left-unturned Trouble Boys biography is that Bob suffered terrifically from domestic abuse during highly formative childhood years… and that he and his younger stepbrother Tommy went on to have a permanent and profound impact on popular music of the late 20th Century is nothing short of a goddamned miracle.

The Jesus and Mary Chain

It gives me great pleasure to finally have the opportunity to properly praise the brothers Reid!

Listen, you want noise, drugs, terrible hair, and that utterly dire, particularly Scottish sense of humor and irony paired with deep fatalism… which characteristics tend to run deeply in Maritime Canada, as far as it goes!… you cannae dae better, ken?

I know that Psychocandy is an LP that turned the world upside down… but for me, it’s really Darklands and Stoned and Dethroned that blow the doors down… and Automatic is pretty off the hook… and probably there’s a bunch more in their later catalogue that is worth checking out… Munki, in particular…

I think I got their city in Scotland wrong. As my Scottish forbearers may, somehow, be sad in the Scottish afterlife… TJ&MC hail from Glasgow… you know… like of “Glasgow smile” fame?

Don’t even get me started on Irvine Welsh. Or haggis. Or kilts. Or Robbie Burns! Just don’t!

Last Wolf in the Woods

I didn’t mention this on the show for lack of time, but boy oh boy is this a departure… of sorts! For Ben “Lucero” Nichols! This synth band is a collaboration with his daughter Joslyn Milburn! And I’m here to tell you that songwriting and vocal performance must be in the home… cause this seems way accomplished for a singer of her years!

This came out with low fanfare and a Bandcamp page last year, and what’s caught my attention listening to it for the first time since then… is how much it sounds entirely like its own thing… when Ben sings, it’s one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary rock music… but because the instrumentation is so utterly different than the punk Americana that Lucero has made their own over the past twenty-plus years… it really defies separating the parts in your mind when you listen…

Furthermore, as per the Bandcamp… it’s the soundtrack to a forthcoming graphic novel! Which explains the wide expanses of… synths… many bars without lyrics or singing… heavy on atmosphere cause synthwave, but also in keeping with an aural experience to be complemented with a narrative and a visual!

Ben’s brother is the immensely talented Jeff Nichols… whose film “Bikeriders” has opened in theaters across North America lately… that’s to say Joslyn’s uncle… said motion picture being named after Jeff’s brother Ben’s band Lucero’s song… it’s downright cinematic, right?

You have families of doctors… lawyers… cobblers… carpenters… and artists! It’s an excellent thing to hear!

And then some!!

Really, we need to do another episode, at least one more, about family acts!

As mentioned in the podcast, I have deep love and respect for members of Fredericton skatepunk stalwarts Missing featuring brothers Jon and Matt Bowie! Missing were legit in all kinds of ways beyond the musical… including in the Deleted Scene website (RIP), show promotion, and in many other projects and in many other ways generally… musical and otherwise!

If you’re talking family acts in Canada, you have to include the Timmins siblings… the three or four of them who have, for the most part been most of the lineup for many these long decades since the late 80’s when they started out in the family garage in Toronto! That’s about as real as it gets for my era and my milieu… late Gen X and pre-internet teen years for the win! Furthermore, while I can’t speak to any of their other albums meaningfully… I can definitely say that Trinity Sessions is one of the most Canadian folk rock things ever… it holds a special place… it’s nighttime listening, 100%!

If, somehow, you missed the documentary A Band Called Death, from about 10 or 12 years back, do yourself a favor and give it a stream! It tells the story of one of the heaviest, early punk bands… Death… from Detroit… managed to record an absolutely killer EP… and then live on in dignified, working class low-key lives… until in the early 00’s when the recordings resurfaced through family connections (?) and thence resulting said documentary and, including presently, playing live and doing some limited touring. …for the Whole World to See is an essential EP for fans of this kind of (rad) music!

Finally, I can’t let these notes go by without shouting out the Screaming Trees… the shoulda-been’s of Seattle grunge… as per Mark Lanegan’s deathly funny memoir Sing Backwards and Weep, recording sessions and live performances could erupt in major fisticuffs… and wrestling… between brothers Van and Gary Lee Conner… thunderously, as these dudes were pretty ginormous! It was largely due to this tension between everyone in the band, as per Lanegan, that they got as far as they did, touring with the likes of Alice and Chains, Neil Young, Oasis, and many others. Now Lanegan is gone, and so is guitarist Van, both within the past two or three years, and both relatively early in middle age.

Weirdly, or not!, this puts me in the mind of something to the effect of take care of the people around you… and reach out to them more than you already do…

I’m gonna get weepy if this keeps up!

We hope you love and/or are loved by your family! Whom or whatever that may be!!

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Filed under: Uncategorized - @ July 5, 2024 11:36 pm