We talk about people being afraid of words, the struggle of being taken seriously with a band name like Vagina Panther, Fu Manchu, Ohio’s shitty sports teams and alien monsters. We drink $8 pitchers of Budweiser and laugh at girls getting hit in the face with moving obstacles on Wipeout.

“So somehow this influences our music,” said Johnathan Swafford, bassist, as a girl is clotheslined by a moving wall and falls into a muddy lake.

“No one ever makes it,” says guitarist John McGill.

This is when I decide this band is the real deal. I’m suspicious of bands with outrageous names—they can’t be trusted. Most times it’s a few jerkoffs with a funny name and no real sense of humor, who can’t play their instruments yet somehow manage to try too hard. I forget about ’em in a few minutes. With Vagina Panther, it’s different. I’m genuinely psyched about this band. Vagina Panther is a good, dirty rock ‘n’ roll band.

“There’s a bazillion bands out there. How do you remember half of these bands? They all sound the same. They all look the same. They’re all from the same place. They’ve all got weird, ethereal names. You’ve got to stand out a little bit, I guess,” says Good.

The name Vagina Panther has positive and negative effects on being noticed, the group agrees. Lots of people assume it’s a joke band because of the name, but the group is obsessed with how it sounds (the bassist has four pedals), its artwork (three of the bandmembers are graphic designers) and music videos, which are over-the-top but professional. McGill says if someone’s not immediately psyched about the band name, he’s learned to immediately follow up with, “Oh, but there’s a girl in the band.”

Swafford, Good and guitarist Dirt wave started playing together in 2007 for fun. They were all friends and it was nothing serious. As they started to accumulate a set of songs, they began to recruit friends, getting John McGill to join on second guitar and June Sung on vocals. Dirt wave left the band to concentrate on art, so Sung decided to take on guitar duties in addition to being frontwoman. Even though she never played guitar that much, in a few months Sung learned all of the songs and the band was set. The group built a practice studio out of a loft space in Greenpoint, named it the Fuck Box and Vagina Panther was born.

The band has one album that it selfreleased last year. The 11-track debut is a serious effort, even if the album cover is a tit with a drop of milk coming out of the nipple and the CD art is, you guessed it, a vagina. The record is full of catchy riffs, short and simple guitar solos and songs with topics ranging from hating the country outside new york (“I Hate Grass”) to Jack and the Beanstalk (“Dave, You are Killing Me”) to looking like a badass rocker in front of your dog (“Eye of Inez”). There’s AC/DC chanting, sound effects of cars and even the Hot 97 wah wah waaaaaaaah siren. It’s fun as hell. But the band is more interested in being great live.

“I think that’s what gets us off more. It’s not necessarily the type of music. It’s if you go and see a show and that band is freakin’ out and goin’ crazy,” says Swafford. “We like to move around a little too much.”

Vagina Panther plays all over the city from “shit bars” to nicer places like the Mercury Lounge. This weekend, the group is joining a long line of killer opening bands for Fu Manchu, which in the past has included the likes of Valient Thorr, Artimus Pyledriver and Turbonegro. Like those bands, Vagina Panther puts on a brilliant live show. and the band’s working on a new album, which the members promise will be heavier than the first.

“Some people have offered to pay for the next record,” Swafford says, “if we change our band name.”

>> Vagina Panther Sept. 4, Santos Party House, 96 Lafayette St. (betw. White & Walker Sts.), 212-584-5492; 6, $15.

The band’s name comes from the typographic term for the spacing below a headline. Don’t worry, I didn’t get it at first either. I thought it was more along the lines of Descender = one who is descending into hell. And the band may be doing just that—because it mixes metal with hardcore like many in the history of loud New York music, but it isn’t about violence or being macho. These guys are into typography. “That makes it fun. You know, we get to talk about types a lot in between songs. We dork out a bit,” says guitarist and vocalist Angelo Pournaras.

If I’ve learned anything from my heroes of early-1980s hardcore, it’s that it doesn’t matter what you are or what you look like, it’s what the music sounds like. Descender is a geeky band with a geeky name. But when you listen to the group’s songs, you won’t be able to tell. The band doesn’t have that Dead Kennedys whine and doesn’t do funny love songs like the Descendents. Like those bands, however, there is intelligence in Descender’s loudness.

Pournaras met Eric Palmerlee at a bar in 2000, the first day he came to the city from Georgia, and they started playing together soon after. “Angelo and I would practice at my apartment in headphones with both our guitars plugged into my computer, and my roommate would walk by and we’d go, ‘dude, you don’t even know how heavy this is,’” says Palmerlee.

Pournaras soon invited his friend Jay Morris to play bass, and the three started jamming in the East Village with a drum machine. Needing a non-robotic drummer, the guys put out an ad on Craigslist and found George Manolis. It was a perfect fit the first time they met. “What do you do for a living? ‘Oh I’m a graphic designer?’ Oh yeah? Done,” recalls Morris.

Descender played its first show at Lit Lounge in 2008 and released a six-song, self-titled EP last summer.

From the first 30 seconds of the record’s first song, “Spit and Stare,” you can hear a lot of ’90s post-hardcore. You know the drill—the song runs through six very different guitar riffs before falling away for a bass/drum verse. The band works with the sounds of the late ’80s and early ’90s, you know, when all the kids from the early days of hardcore started new bands and worked on crafting songs that weren’t all three chords. And while a lot of bands like to go back to that time, descender remembers bands like Quicksand, Snapcase, Helmet and the mighty Fugazi. Descender constructs melodic songs without losing the hardcore killer instinct. And the best part of Descender is that it sounds like a classic hardcore band, but the music is never verse-chorus-verse. The line “This will end!” in “Breaking” could easily pass for a classic hardcore mantra, while the main riff sounds like something out of Steve Albini’s brain with metal Kung-Kungs breaking it up.

“For a while I felt that Brooklyn bands all sounded the same, but now I’m starting to feel that there’s a lot of diversity,” says Pournaras.

This is the sentiment of many louder bands in Kings County. For years the DIY scene was something to envy, but a lot of the bands sucked. Now, some of the heavier bands are using the scene to bring about a third wave of New York hardcore that’s about letting off steam with the chops to back it up. Descender plays DIY bars like Tommy’s Tavern in Greenpoint or Bushwick’s Party Expo with bands like Tournament, Pygmy Shrews and Vagina Panther.

In January, Descender released Live at the Mercury Lounge, eight songs the guys recorded themselves onto a minidisc player. It’s got a lot of songs from the self-titled EP, but the band is definitely better live. On “And So We Marched,” Morris and George prove to be as important to the band as the dueling guitars up front. The song is essentially the band’s sole slow groove song, and it’s a sign that melodic hardcore not only ain’t dead, it’s being reborn. Or, if you’re going by the image on the album’s cover, it’s being ripped from the womb. Either way, the typography is pretty good—if you’re into that sort of thing.

>> Descender

Aug. 5, Lit Lounge, 93 2nd Ave. (betw. E. 5th & E. 6th Sts.), 212-777-7987; 9, $TBA.

If
someone asks you what you are listening to and you respond, “This
killer song by Weird Owl,” they think you said Weird Al and you have a
slight speech impediment. By the time they’ve stopped laughing and you
admit that yes, you do have a slight speech impediment, especially when
drinking, they laugh harder and the point is dead.

“No, no, really. It’s a
good band.” “Yeah, OK.” They leave and watch the videos for “Fat” or
“Amish Paradise” and relive their shitty days in middle school.

I’m not here to defend
this sort of rabble, which is mostly nitpicking or cutesy attempts at
cleverness. I’m also not here to tell you that Weird Owl is a great band
or the five guys are good hardworking fellas or any other pat-on
the-back bullshit. I’m not even here to describe the music using the
tired music journalist thesaurus. I’m here to tell you there is a use
for music that does not belong. There is a use for Weird Owl.

It sounds sterile, I know.
But it’s the goddamn truth. I think people sometimes forget why they
listen to music in the first place. Is it dancing music? Relaxing music?
Fucking music? When you boil it down, every song has its use, but you
have to know how to use it. Some think it’s good to listen to relaxing
music to calm you down. This is wrong. You get there faster going over
the top; try free jazz or noise punk. Some think you should deal with
the warm weather in New York City—everyone on top of each other sweating
and looking for space—by listening to angry/riffy/electro/garage/ dance
music. This is wrong, too. Try slow spacey jams about disconnecting
your body and your soul, man.

“Our vibrational frequencies are long and need open
space. Everything that usually comes out of New York is really fast,
angular, fast and edgy, has attitude and all,” says Trevor Tyrell, Weird
Owl’s lead singer and guitarist.

“Think about this. The entire city is a grid, when you
walk around you’re walking in a grid. You gotta turn corners, but out
west there’s open spots. You’ve got open canyons and things and organic
areas. New York is not like that, but our music comes out of New York.
It’s more familiar and more expansive.”

The song “Skeletelepathic” nails this
philosophy. Tyrell sings slowly, like a Richard Hell 45 played at 33 1/3
RPM, “Take my hands I don’t need them/ Take my eyes I can’t see anyway/
And take my flesh I can’t feel it/ But my bones are my bones.”

There is an obvious
Byrds/Neil Young style going on with the guitar, but it never seems to
be trying too hard. Still, the apparent strength is the lyrics.

“When I was just a friend
of theirs watching their band play I’d say, ‘Wow! Really far out lyrics.
I have no idea what’s goin’ on,’“ says bassist Ken Cook.

“That’s the overall goal of
psychedelic music. To trick your mind into that state where it’s not a
linear consciousness of everyday waking reality. You’re processing
things on a different level,” adds Tyrell.

Weird Owl started in 2004, but through many
transformations finally came together a couple years ago and last year
released a debut LP on Tee Pee Records. Jon Rudd plays guitar, Sean
Reynolds drums, John Cassidy plays keys, Cook plays bass and sings
backup and Tyrell is the chief lyricist, singer and guitarist.

The band has no plans to
leave the city. This isn’t some Midwest via Brooklyn band. This is a New
York band and it makes spacey music.

“I don’t want to live in San Francisco or Portland or
L.A. The people out there have a little more space to live in, in
general, but we’re New Yorkers. We all live in New York. That’s how it
is,” says Cook.

Use
Weird Owl to float above the grid, above the packed park or sweaty bus.
Sway your way through the summer heat. Substances help, but are not
mandatory.

>
WEIRD OWL May 29, Glasslands, 289 Kent Ave. (at S. 2nd St.), Brooklyn,
718-599-1450; 7, $12.

I HEAR FLAMING TUSK from three houses down, which is good since Astoria is a foreign country to me. I stand in front of the porch in the rain and listen to the band blast through “Ichor,” a song off the new album Old, Blackened Century. The singer sounds like the meanest motherfucker in the world, scratching out lyrics about the horror of Vietnam including the line that’s been stuck in my head for weeks: “Ho Chi Mien Kissinger!” The guitars seamlessly alternate between doom riffs and classic death metal with a solo that’s best described as Fast Eddie Clarke from Motorhead. The sidewalk shakes. I’m in the right place.

I get inside the band’s basement lair and instead of meeting the metal demigods I imagined to be making this noise, five nice-looking fellas greet me. They don’t look scary at all. They introduce themselves as Andy, Keith, Zach, Chris and Eric. I expected Schneidaar, Antipope Zosimus, Dumnorix Xristophage, Stolas Trephinator and Don Blood, the names listed on their music. I expected Dethklok in the flesh. Hell, they only have one Slayer tattoo between the five of them! I’m shocked. And then we start talking shop. An hour talking metal with these gentlemen and let me tell you dear readers, I actually learned something: metal is not always what it’s supposed to be.

The band started with the name.

Drummer Dumnorix Xristophage was on his computer and “Flaming Tusk” popped into his head. He told his guitarist friend Don Blood as a joke that it would make a great metal band name. Blood took him seriously and recruited his roommates Schneidaar for bass and Zosimus for second guitar. For vocals, Xristophage got his old friend Stolas Trephinator, AKA Chris Krovatin, the author of two successful novels Venemous and Heavy Metal and You. Flaming Tusk was born.

Each of the members has a different musical background. Collectively, they’ve been involved with hip-hop, electro, rock, indie-pop and country-rock. When they told their friends about Flaming Tusk, some of didn’t take them seriously.

“Everyone thought we were kidding, like, ‘Ha, ha, you’re gonna have a metal band—that’s funny guys,’ and then they would actually hear what we were doing and go, ‘Holy shit, they’re not fucking around.’”Since some of the band was not as well versed in metal as Dumnorix and Stolas, Dumnorix created the Necromusicon, four CDs of metal and an accompanying essay on what he calls “the foundational building blocks” of metal.

The CDs were split into four metal categories: thrash, death, black and doom. I’m no expert, but I would find it hard to place either of the band’s first two records, the Abigail EP and Old, Blackened Century, in any of these categories. And the band agrees.

“We’re very much dedicated to trying to do something that isn’t done that often. Our love of metal is a lot of times our love of things that are incredibly metal even though they’re not commonly used in metal song imagery,” says Trephinator, who writes all the lyrics with thematic input from the band.

The band’s first EP is titled Abigail after a six-year-old girl from Minnesota who had part of her small intestines ripped out by the suction of a pool filter in 2007. The EP was released digitally for pay-what-youwant with all proceeds going to the Abigail Taylor Foundation for the Advancement of Pool Safety. Their new album Old, Blackened Century, released with a similar pricing format, has a song about undergoing surgery titled “No Smiles” as well as a tale of five guys on a raft in the middle of the ocean deciding who they are going to eat first titled “Instability.”

“There’s one part that’s where they’re drawing straws to see who’s gonna get eaten, and then there’s another part that’s the same thing but faster and that’s the second time that happens,” says Don Blood about how the band tries to meld lyrics to the music.

Flaming Tusk seeks to find things that are metal but may not be completely accepted by the metal community as metal.

“We have a no vampires rule,” says Zosimus.

“No Germans and no vampires,” adds Don Blood.

You don’t need a reaper, an elf, a dragon or a serial killer to be metal. A pool ripping out the intestines of a little girl or a soldier going mad in a Vietnam jungle is metal, too. Scream that over some heavy sludge and pounding drums, forget about what a metalhead is supposed to look like, get a name from something bad ass like a mammoth’s tusk and, hey what he fuck, light it on fire. That is metal.

>>FLAMING TUSK May 17, Lit Lounge, 93 2nd Ave. (betw. E. 5th & E. 6th Sts.), 212-777-7987; 9, $6.

PEOPLE LOVE LITURGY for the same reasons other people hate Liturgy. I’m not sure what philosopher said it, but if you hate something enough, it’s not all that different from love. You spend time hating.Your hatred defines you. If you are courageous or fucking stupid enough (depending on your perspective), you act on it. It’s good to know what you hate just as much as what you love. Liturgy, New York’s premier metal band, is a great example of this.

If you had to define the band’s listening population, I guess it would be: The open-minded who aren’t turned off by the tremolo/blast beat black metal sound and have no problem with the fact that these guys aren’t immersed in the lifestyle that goes with black metal. But that ain’t right either, because who’s really open-minded anymore?

This is 2010. It’s time for war, hate and misunderstanding.

Liturgy was formed by Hunter Hunt- Hendrix, as a one-man black metal band. He played guitar and screamed over a drum machine. Over the last year or so, Liturgy has grown to a full band, including Greg Fox, Hunter’s buddy from high school, on drums,Tyler Dusenbury on bass and Bernard Gann on guitar.The band’s first proper album, Renihilation, came out last year and it started playing regular shows in some Brooklyn DIY spaces like Death by Audio and Market Hotel.The band describes itself as “Pure Transcendental Black Metal,” which is as good a way as any to put it into words.

“The rules for black metal have been so orthodox and so rigid for a lot of its history, but the techniques that are actually employed can really be used to do all dif ferent kinds of things,” says Hunt-Hendrix.

While talking to Hunt-Hendrix, he named a lot of influences, ranging from black metal bands Emperor, Darkthrone and Xasthur to avant-garde guitar god Glenn Branca to weird 19th-century classical composers Carl Nielson, Anton Bruckner and Alexander Scriabin. Hunt-Hendrix also says he brings in lots of outside influences, including free jazz, and says Liturgy is even open to playing improvised shows in the future. Comments like this have gotten Hunt-Hendrix into trouble.

“I get MySpace messages from people who hate my band so much that they’ll write me these long message about how we’re not true, we’re not playing black metal so we shouldn’t say we are,” says Hunt-Hendrix.

To make it easy for you visual folks out there, I’ve got a chart [see sidebar]. My original chart had everything in the Awesome column repeated in the Suck column to prove the ridiculousness of it all, but I changed it to give some haters a say.

The comments come from popular metal site Metalsucks.com, BrooklynVegan and smaller blogs that mostly specialize in metal reviews. One thing I couldn’t add was this: Renihilation is 39 minutes of dizzying, horrifying beautiful music regardless of genre. I couldn’t find a comment anywhere criticizing the actual music, all bullshit aside.

“If it’s exciting to some stranger in Scotland and he hates it so much he wants to write me a message about it, that’s kind of cool,” says Hunt- Hendrix. “I’m not offended; I’m more flattered.”

The lovers say some of the things I say:

Liturgy is chaotic and epic. Fox’s drums might be the best drumming in black metal.The closing to “Ecstatic Rite” is so good, I listen to the song over and over just to make sure I didn’t miss something. It makes me feel like destroying. It’s violent, like black metal, but with enough harmony there’s gotta be room for love.

> Liturgy

Mar. 6, Union Pool, 484 Union Ave. (at Meeker Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-609-0484; 9, $10.

A lot has been said, both good and bad, about Brooklyn’s Liturgy. Here are some of our favorites:

What we think

Greg Fox is an insane drummer and happens to have curly, blond hair.

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix went to Columbia and knows what Darkthrone is.

Liturgy’s album art includes clouds and rays of sun and solar eclipses.

What Internet haters say

“Since when did Hanson start doing black metal?”

“Is this how you´re making use of your Columbia College degree? Oy vey.”

“Black metal is Satan, it is blasphemy, it is extremity and principles and respect for the forefathers of the genre.”

Shellshag is Johnny Shell and Jen Shag. He sings and plays guitar and she sings and plays drums. For years they lived in San Francisco and ran Starcleaners, a record label and public arts space.They were in bands together (Kung Fu USA) and apart (Shell in 50 Million), but all that matters now is that they are Shellshag. Live, a wild beast. On record, sweet and fuzzy.

“We’ve been friends for 10 years and this band has only been the last five years,” says Shag, who offers me popcorn as Shell scans his record wall for something suitable to listen to. “Before that, we’ve done tons of stuff and we’re always just trying to have fun in different ways.”

Shell chooses Pavement’s Wowee Zowee and we talk about the sculptures they make to end all their shows.They stack their drums and amps and mic stand while Shell either stomps on his guitar or adds it to the sculpture. Shag plays three drums standing up while dancing so the windchimes and metal chains clank around to substitute for cymbals.The two face each other the whole show.

“She gets to see me do all the rock star stuff,” says Shell as he plays air guitar and makes a tough guy face. “It’s for her, you know. No one gets to see that fuckin’ shit except her.”

Rumors in Disguise is a 15-song, 32-minute punk pop classic for the new decade. Every song is catchy, but unlike Weezer or Matt & Kim, groups the band is foolishly compared to, Shellshag is anti-clever and anti-cute.

Songs like “Get Right” with its verse of “Blah blah blah blah blah/ is all I hear,” or the paranoia turned acceptance of “Wake Up” are real. It’s catchy enough for top 40 or fucking MTV, but if they ever played it on television, heads might explode.

The first time my head exploded Shellshag-style was in person—the best way. The band opened, or really co-headlined, with the Screaming Females at Mercury Lounge. I tell the two that I’ve never been so blown away by an opening band so much I lost interest in the band I was there to see. I equate Shellshag to The Who from the Rolling Stone’s Rock n’ Roll Circus when Jagger refused to air “A Quick One While He’s Away” because it made The Stones look bad.

“That’s right! That’s right!” says Shag. “We are so big on The Who, man,” says Shell.

“That’s our favorite thing in the world,” agrees Shag.

We all think it’s the best, so Shag turns his iMac around and we watch it. It was then I realized the only logical comparison to Shellshag. Forget the comparisons to any of those chick-and-dude duos.That’s lazy. Let’s try the 2010 equivalent to The Who in ’67. Shell has Entwistle’s sweetness and Townshend’s roar. Shag has Moon’s craze and Daltrey’s, uh, eyes. Shellshag creates a spectacle with the chops to back it up. In a better world, Shellshag would be the ones playing the Super Bowl’s Halftime Show and 100 million people’s heads would explode across the country simultaneously.

–
Shellshag
Feb. 6, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 7, $15.

Let California have desert rock. Let the ’70s have space rock. Right now, we’ve got mountain rock. I know it doesn’t make much sense because the guys in Naam sleep in Brooklyn, but if you listen carefully to the band’s debut LP and imagine where something like this was created, you’d probably think of a cabin in the middle of the woods.

In May, Naam loaded two vans with nine guitars, five basses, 15 drums and cymbals, seven keyboards, 12 amps, 25 effect pedals and 15 miscellaneous instruments—including a sitar, lap steel, theremin, flute and mandolin—for a journey to a friend’s cabin turned recording studio upstate. In 12 days, the band recorded an album that my feeble mind can only define as grand. The opening track, "Kingdom," which clocks in at over 16 minutes, begins with a long intro of crickets and wind and that spooky synth you hear on the opening drive up the mountains in The Shining.

When "Kingdom" starts to build, pay attention. The best advice I can give you was given to me by Kyuss in the booklet for 1994′s masterpiece Welcome to Sky Valley: "Instructions: Listen without distraction." Naam plays meditation tunes for the tormented. Forget Om, you can chant Naammmmmm all throughout the album, even when "Skyling Slip" kicks the album into second and you’re head banging and sitting cross-legged on a pile of dirty clothes in your room. It’s easier than chanting Dead Meadooooow.

And unlike the rest of the throwback rock that New York City is pumping out these days, Naam has all the piss and vinegar of its forefathers and none of the twee intonation of its peers.  
"Psychedelic rock kind of merged with indie rock and you’ve got all these really wimpy, wussy knock offs of ’60s pysch music. Some of it’s good, some of it’s alright, but nobody ever put any balls into it," says bassist John Bundy.

Guitarist Ryan Lugar adds, "Usually the pysch bands aren’t heavy enough or the heavy bands aren’t pysch enough.”

The change from "Tidal Barrens" into "Icy Row," the album’s best track, is a good example of this. "Tidal Barrens" is a modern version of Iggy’s weird chanting on the Stooges’ "We Will Fall," while "Icy Row" uses the technological advances since Blue Cheer without losing any of the guts. Instead of relying on a simple phase left to right channel, Naam transforms Bundy’s vocals to mold with the bass. It sounds like he’s screaming and playing bass from a cave while the rest of the band is rocking outside. Eli Pizzuto is punching his toms with his fists on top of a cliff and Lugar is smashing his guitar against a tree.

At a live show, you’ll get pretty much the same thing. Pizzuto breaks a drum every time the band plays. "Shit just falls apart. After a while sometimes I just start punching my floor tom, just because it’s there," he says.

"Live, we’re a whole different animal," says Bundy.

"It’s definitely way heavier and way faster and louder," says Lugar.

There are no good instructions for seeing Naam live, but I can suggest not sitting cross-legged on the floor—you might get mistaken for a drum and get clocked in the face.

>Naam
Dec. 12, The Charleston, 174 Bedford Ave. (betw. N. 7th & N. 8th Sts.), Brooklyn, no phone; 9, $10

“I MET HIM only once, at a goddamn stupid party” is a line from Catcher in the Rye. It’s not well known or anything. It’s not in anyone’s high school yearbook. Yet for some reason, a few dudes from Brooklyn decided to name their band after it. Now you’re thinking, “Why the hell would anyone name their band after such a weird quote?” Or maybe, “Why the hell would anyone name their band Stupid Party?”Well, these guys don’t give a shit what you’re thinking.

I met the band at Jimmy’s Diner in Williamsburg. Bassist Chuck E. Violence was filling ketchup bottles and sweeping up the place for closing as I sat in the middle of the rest of the band at the counter.

They cracked jokes, made fun of each other and argued about pretty much everything related to Stupid Party.

“It was a reference to J.D. Salinger,” says Johnny Norton, the drummer.

“That’s not true,” says Cory Feiernan, the lead singer and guitarist.

“I thought it came from The Toy starring Richard Pryor,” says their friend Colin, sitting at the end of the counter.

“It came from Ghost and there’s this line where Patrick Swayze says ‘I don’t wanna go to that goddamn stupid party,’” says Feiernan.

These guys don’t take things very seriously, but that’s what makes them such a kick-ass band. Stupid Party is unpretentious, balls-out, house party music for the soul, songs from a side of Brooklyn that doesn’t get national or even much local love because it’s not as nice as the Dirty Projectors or MGMT.

For the last two years, Stupid Party has hosted shows at the house its members share in Crown Heights.You may have seen listings and flyers for bands like Screaming Females, Bad

Blood or Shellshag playing somewhere called the Fort. That’s the living room.

“We live together in a huge shitty house, we work jobs that we mildly pretend to hate and we all play music,” says Norton.

So far, Stupid Party has released a selftitled LP and a 7”; a split 7” with Bad Blood is on the way. The band is currently recording an album for the Vivian Girls-run Wild World Records, but don’t jump to conclusions.They don’t sound anything like their famous friends.With a gun to my head, I’d say they sound like a less organized Mudhoney or happier Melvins, with too much metal for garage rock, but too much bounce for actual metal.These sounds crash together in single songs, changing up speeds, going from almost black metal shrieks to sing-a-long ooohs and aaahs.

Listen to “Sludger” off the debut LP and you’ll start slowly nodding like you’re listening to stoner rock, but before your neck has reached that perfect Zen rhythm, the song will jump into a fast MC5 riff that seamlessly melds into a punk sing-a-long.

When I asked what the guys in the band listen to, hoping to figure out how they came up with this sound, they started throwing around band names.

“There’s no band that each of us all agree on,” concludes guitarist Nate Stark. They all call out a couple more and each make faces.

“We all like Creedence,” says Feiernan. “Yeah, we like CCR,” says the rest of the band.

If you try hard, you might be able to hear a little CCR in “No Hell.” The song has an epic Creedence breakdown and build, but I don’t think Fogerty ever shrieked with such agony as Feiernan on this song. It’s like listening to four dudes in black jeans and dirty T-shirts play “Ramble Tamble” after each of them chugged two Red Bulls and a six pack of PBR, didn’t feel like tuning, ran their guitars through a Superfuzz Big Muff and played it in half the time. In other words, it’s fucking fun.

> Stupid Party

Dec. 6, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8, $16

THERE’S SOMETHING obnoxious about the singer-songwriter label. Oh, how talented you are, not only do you sing your own songs, but you write them too! There’s got to be a better way to talk about someone playing an acoustic guitar and singing songs. For Sharon van Etten, the best word I can come up with is “songstress.”

Yeah, I don’t like it either, but with van Etten it’s the only term that makes sense. Once you hear her, you’ll think there’s a girl who has found her calling in life. There is no way she should be doing anything but writing songs and singing them.

Over a cup of coffee at Smooch in Ft. Greene, I realize van Etten is the exact opposite of her sad songs. She’s funny, upbeat and cute, with short black hair. It’s almost impossible to think she could know the misery that comes through on Because I Was In Love, her first full-length album, which came out in May. Right now she’s trying to quit smoking so she sucks on toothpicks flavored with tea tree oil. She has a very cool tattoo of an acoustic guitar hole on her arm. I ask her bluntly, “Why play live?”

She stops gnawing on her toothpick. “To have a connection with people,” she says. “Every show is such an individual show… you are sharing that one moment and it will never ever happen like that again.You’ll never play that song like that again.”

It’s a textbook answer, but she’s got me. I don’t even question it. I believe her. Her voice has the power to dig into your skin, move through your body and clutch your heart. Even on record, there will be a song that will grab you and not let you go. For me it was “Tornado.” I found myself sitting on the bus staring into oblivion singing “I’m a tornado/ You are the dust/ You’re all around and you’re inside.” I put it on repeat when I got home and my girlfriend left the room, saying she didn’t want to get in the way of me and my new love.

And really, that’s the best way to describe her music. Live or on record, you’ll think she’s sitting beside you singing. Every song on Because I Was In Love sounds like it is being played in your bedroom.That’s what she wanted.With producer Greg Weeks, a founding member of the Espers, she tried to keep the record as minimal as possible. Her acoustic guitar finger picking was recorded at the same time as her singing.

“I never really tune my guitar to anything, it’s relative to itself. So, after I sang, played and did guitar and vocals for all the tracks on the album, we went to add stuff and we realized that I wasn’t tuned to anything. Greg said, ‘What did you do? We need to get you a tuner!’”

But in the end, they decided not to rerecord. They worked the other instruments in, even holding the pitch knob halfway down on the synth to make it match her tuning.You won’t notice. You’ll be thinking more about all the times you’ve had your heart broken and how finally a girl with a guitar sounds like she knows what misery is.

People that I’ve spoken to about van Etten have told me they think her music is therapeutic, but I didn’t realize it until I reached for Because I Was In Love after a bad day, not my usual angry punk or metal. I sunk down and she asked me, “Have you seen what I once called my heart/ Have you seen my life that’s now falling apart?/ Ooh my life that’s now falling apart…” I didn’t know how to answer, so I sat there and let her words run through me.

> Sharon van Etten

Sept. 4, Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. Astor Pl. & E. 4th St.), 212-539-8770; 7, $12

It’s an easy band name. Everything’s black. Dice. Lips. Mold. A mountain.The Sabbath. But when you move the over-used first word to second, it’s intriguing. A new spin on an old formula.

The first thing I think of when I listen to Soft Black is the Soft White Underbelly, the original name for Blue Oyster Cult.The two have almost nothing in common sonically, but each band had their shit together thematically.While concept strains can be found throughout Blue Oyster Cult’s discography, the band tied it all together with 1988’s Imaginos. Soft Black’s The Earth is Black is as cohesive as Imaginos. It’s based on a series of Cacchione’s dreams, though some should really be called nightmares.

“I had this dream: I woke up from my bed, and I walked outside.There’s a kind of haziness about the landscape, and there was kind of a red glow above everything. I was walking down the street, and I noticed that there were just piles and piles of bodies— Holocaust style—all on top of each other.  "They were totally white and totally drained of all their blood,” says Cacchione.The music at the beginning of the album evokes this image, which is on the cover.

When I hear Soft Black, I think of oldtimey photos, those fuzzy black-and-white pictures of Leadbelly or Woody Guthrie sitting in a chair holding a guitar.That’s not exactly how Soft Black looks. Seeing the band live will conjure images of a grainy Crawdaddy cover from 1967. Long hair. Hippy clothes.They lean toward psychedelic rock live, especially when the guitars and synths start swirling around, but the record has more to do with blues Dylan and the spaceyfolk hybrid the Byrds.

For anyone missing bands than can write straight-up sing-alongs along with deep rock tracks, the bass/drum heavy “I Am An Animal” and the 13th Floor Elevators-esque rocker “Did You Put a Spell On Me?” are addictive; they get everyone bouncing.

Drummer Michael Stefanov and bassist Matthew Molnar prove to be a damn good rhythm section, and Brian Amsterdam’s guitar freak outs are some of the best in the city. Cacchione was born in Jersey and moved to Brooklyn in 2002. After making friends in the anti-folk community at Avenue A’s Sidewalk Café, he formed Soft Black.The band released an LP, Blue Gold, in 2007 and a 7”, Pearl With No String on Molnar’s Plays With Dolls Records before releasing The Earth Is Black on July 21. So if they were going for mysterious with the whole band name thing, they have succeeded.They are very mysterious. Most current Brooklyn bands don’t have lyrics like, “Everybody´s chewing on the limbs of children…We´re all kissing the dirt and decomposing” from the bittersweet “Kissing the Dirt.” You might be singing along and not even realize it’s about biting a child’s rotting arm. Yet for all its horror, the album never gets depressing. Cacchione reveals crazy visions; but instead of creating a world of horror from them, he tells the story of dealing with them.The final song “Night Terrors” goes back to the horror scene of the first song, concluding, “If I wake up shaking and my heart is racing, then I’ll wake up shaking.Then I’ll wake up shaking.” A wall of synth creeps up behind the band and the album ends.Yes, it’s disturbing, but it’s also beautiful:The narrator has accepted the horror.

So what does this bleak attitude toward the world mixed with a throwback folkpsych sound amount to? Let’s go back to the band name. “I was just trying to think of two simple words that can pull at each other and twist each other into a new feeling and a new shape,” Cacchione says, “two words that don’t necessarily need to belong together so the meaning can stay fresh for me.” Playing with the old to bring in the new.

> Soft Black

Aug. 7, The Charleston, 174 Bedford Ave. (betw. N. 7th & N. 8th Sts.), Brooklyn, 718-782-8717; 8, $7