South By Southwest is next week, which means I'm in my usual crazy-busy stretch of trying to write my way out of town. But hey, I've always got time for one of my favorite annual time-wasters, perusing the band list for funny names. Here's what jumped off of it this year:

3 Dudes & a Mullet (Mexico City)
All Pigs Must Die (Boston)
Backwoods Payback (West Chester, Pa.)
Ben Caplan & the Casual Smokers (Halifax)
Bipolar Gentlemen (Austin)
Bleeding Knees Club (Australia)
Cairo Knife Fight (Christchurch, New Zealand)
Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! (Pasis)
Com Truise (Princeton, N.J.)
Forever the Sickest Kids (Dallas)
Green Corn Revival (Weaterford, Okla.)
Hess Is More (New York)
Imagine Dragons (Las Vegas)
Junebug Spade (Oklahoma City)
Kids These Days (Chicago)
The Lighthouse and the Whaler (Cleveland)
Mass Solo Revolt (East Tawas, Mich.)
Miracles of Modern Science (Brooklyn)
Moonmen on the Moon, Man (Brooklyn)
My Sweet Canary Ensemble (Tel Aviv)
Nightmare Air (Los Angeles)
Not in the Face!! (Austin)
OCD: Moosh & Twist (Philadelphia)
Pets With Pets (Carlton North, Australia)
Right Away, Great Captain! (Atlanta)
Schmillion (Austin)
Sleeping With Sirens (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
The Soft White Sixties (San Francisco)
Something Fierce (Houston)
The Suicide of Western Culture (Barcelona, Spain)
You Can't Win, Charlie Brown (Lisbon, Portugal)
You Say Francis & I Whistle (Stocklholm, Sweden)
The Young Evils (Seattle)

South By Southwest once again draws nigh, one of my favorite times of the year. And one of my favorite annual rituals is to peruse the band list for shows to see while taking note of funny, unusual, clever or horrifying names. So here is this year's list of band monikers that caught my eye. If the best thing a name can do is get your attention, all these groups are ahead of the game.

Romance on a Rocketship (Lebanon, Mo.)
And So I Watch You From Afar (Belfast, Ireland)
Banjo or Freakout (London)
The Megaphonic Thrift (Bergen, Norway)
Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now! (London)
Hunx and His Punx (San Francisco)
Plastic Crimewave Sound (Chicago)
Homeboy Sandman (New York)
Mittens on Strings (Chicago)
LudaChrist (Los Angeles)
Smash Gordon (Baltimore)
Yourself and the Air (Chicago)
Drive Like Maria (Hasselt, Belgium)
King Dude (Seattle)
Binary Audio Misfits (Toulouse, France)
Birthday Suits (Minneapolis)
Morning Teleportation (Portland, Ore.)
We Are Wolves (Montreal)
The Click Clack Boom (New York)
The So So Glos (New York)
Chiddy Bang (Philadelphia)
Epileptinomicon (Denver)
Phil and the Osophers (Brooklyn)
Teeth Mountain (Baltimore)
Scars on 45 (Leeds, England)
Demolished Thoughts (New York)
Trampled by Turtles (Duluth, Minn.)
Gay Witch Abortion (Minneapolis)
Dances With White Girls (New York)
Teenage Bottlerocket (Laramie, Wyo.)
This Will Destroy You (Austin, Texas)
Uninhabitable Mansions (Brooklyn)

Four weeks from today, South by Southwest will be in full swing, with thousands upon thousands of bands swarming around Austin, Texas, to play showcases both authorized and not. I can't wait. Until then, however, perusing the list of performing bands for funny names is one of my favorite pastimes. The following is what caught my eye this year; maybe I'll even get to see some of them.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw (Zuzax, N.M.)
The Aimless Never Miss (San Francisco)
Angry Vs. The Bear (Essex, U.K.)
Boxcar Satan (San Antonio)
Care Bears on Fire (New York)
Closure in Moscow (Melbourne, Australia)
Dananananaykroyd (Glasgow, Scotland)
DD/MM/YYYY (Toronto)
Dear and the Headlights (Tempe, Ariz.)
Deleted Waveform Gatherings (Oslo, norway)
Don't Tell Sophie (Tacoma, Wash.)
Fair to Midland (Sulpher Springs, Texas)
Hollerado (Montreal)
Hurray for the Riff Raff (New Orleans)
I Love Math (Dallas)
In Case of Fire (Belfast, Ireland)
NeverShoutNever! (Joplin, Mo.)
Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man (London)
The Paranoid Critical Revolution (New York)
Pocahaunted (Los Angeles)
River City Tanlines (Memphis)
The Rural Alberta Advantage (Toronto)
Sanguine Piss (Philadelphia)
The Tallest Man on Earth (Karlstad, Sweden)
Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt (Purchase, New York)
U Can Unlearn Guitar (Chicago)
We Were Promised Jetpacks (Glasgow)