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Pissed Grave: Let's Pee On American Hitler

It's a well-known fact that most band names are essentially gobbledygook, but here at Houston Press we're trying hard to find meaning in the oddest monikers.

I live for a band like Dallas' Pissed Grave, honestly. Oh, not because they're especially brilliant or move me musically or anything. I just love music that is chaotic and unredeemable. I like the sound of notes and lyrics scourging each other with razors in some half-remembered ritual of painful salvation. It's like a little microcosm of dystopia for the ears.

Take my favorite track from their demo earlier this year, "Raining Shit." It's throbbing, incomprehensible, loud, and full of a hateful energy that both alludes to punk and metal but is so passionately self-destructive that it actively repulses those genres even as it draws strength from them.

Or maybe you'd like something like "Junky Rat," which makes me wonder what songs Cole Porter would've turned out in the final stages of a terminal meth addiction. What a total screaming rejection of form or boundary, yet delivered with the circular rage of an atomic bomb. I dig it.

But that name...

Hair Balls:

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Pissed Grave, really? I mean, isn't there any area where you'll show a little respect? I know I'm asking this of a band that sings about fecal thunderstorms and has a rapey-sounding tune called "Silence Give Consent," but don't pee on my Nana's resting place. Even if she was a little racist.

I decided to fire off my Name Cannon at the band. This is what I got back.

We wrote the song 'Pissed Grave' with our old band Guiso. It was during the 2012 presidential primaries and expressed a general disgust with every candidate and a desire to see them all dead and piss on their graves.

After a few member changes, we changed the band name to Pissed Grave (Coke Stroke was a close runner-up).

That... that has got to be the most straightforwardly honest, if juvenile and horrifying answer I have ever gotten to an inquiry. "You! Talking head that wants to be charge. 1. Fuck you. 2. Die. 3. prepare for the nectar of my kidneys where your body is entrusted to the dust." There's just something so awesomely petty about it.

I don't know if I'll ever look at Barack Obama or Mitt Romney again without thinking about how there are four guys in a band in Dallas who found them so enraging and vile that they pictured urinating on their tombs.

I mean, I didn't like Romney very much, but I never thought, "Your ideas about taxation makes my bladder shout unholy warcries."

I did ask the band if there was anyone in particular they wanted to piss on the grave of. The answer was unanimous; George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, who marched against Martin Luther King, coined the phrase, "white power," started a record label that released a song called "Ship Those Niggers Back," and eventually pissed off enough people to get shot in the head in 1967.

Make room for one more, boys. I'm going to empty this Route 44 Coke Zero along your side.

FINAL DEFINITION

Pissed Grave: (n) 1. A grave that has been urinated on. 2. An anarchic band from Dallas. 3. Drink that liquid gold, you Nazi shithead.

Pissed Grave plays tonight at the East Side Social Center with Iskallt Regn, Distort, and Garbage Dump.

For more nameolgy, check out the origins behind, Ninjas From Texas, We Scare Coyotes, and Hoffle Stoff Awaffogus. Hint: one of them involves weed.

Jef With One F is a recovering rock star taking it one day at a time. You can read about his adventures in The Bible Spelled Backwards or connect with him on Facebook.

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Jef Rouner (not cis, he/him) is a contributing writer who covers politics, pop culture, social justice, video games, and online behavior. He is often a professional annoyance to the ignorant and hurtful.
Contact: Jef Rouner