Sooooooo... The Dead Revolt. They're loud, crash-bangy indie-rockers who tend to do very well here in the city. However, we are not here to tell you how awesome they are. We are here to talk about why someone would call their band The Dead Revolt.
Most of us are revolted by the dead. Especially if they sparkle. Names involving corpses are usually reserved for Cookie Monster Metal bands, but that did not deter guitarist/vocalist George Baba when he reached the end of the most holy of all journeys that a band goes through: Finding a moniker that hasn't been taken.
We here at Rocks Off are notoriously hard on local bands that adopt names that are already being used. In the MySpace generation, there is really no excuse for it at all. Common sense has therefore elevated Baba a great deal in our eyes.
"For the first six or seven months we jammed together we had no name nor did we worry about what we should call ourselves," he says. "The idea of a name only really came up when we decided to play live. We first came up with the name Vimana, a word from ancient Sanskrit texts that describes a flying machine.
"We all agreed on that name and were quite satisfied until we found out that it had already been taken by another band. We soon realized that about any name or stupid combination of words is somehow already a band name for some other band out there. Unable to easily come up with originality - is anything original ever easy?, we decided to brainstorm.
"We were looking for simplicity but also wanted originality. The name started out like a list of others on a piece of paper after a few weeks of just righting down random thoughts or ideas that popped into our heads. The name just kinda stood out so we checked and it wasn't taken. Original, intriguing, and fitting for our style of music, we took the name and now its stuck with us."
We applaud this. We really do. It's a simple little method that more bands should follow. Now that you have a name, though, you have to live up to it. You can't just call yourselves The Dead Revolt. Now you have to be The Dead Revolt. The name struck a chord with the band, and they currently plan to use it as a plot for a future concept album.
According to Baba, there will be an inter-dimensional civil war at some point in the future. The souls of the dead who do not wish to be reincarnated will nonetheless be forced to by higher powers. Stuck on Earth, these souls will rise up against the very cycle of rebirth itself! Talk about taking on the Man!
Rocks Off is still troubled, though. When you say The Dead Revolt, we're not thinking of these ethereal specters. We're thinking of rotting corpses marching to devour.
"Aren't you revolted by the dead?" we asked Baba.
"I mean we all end up there," he said. "We are not like fixed on the idea of death our anything, but it is a big event in everyone's lives. You know the end part. Like how when you're at the end of a bag of chips and you wish you had more chips?
"That's what we are revolted by, the short amount of chips bestowed upon us in this life."
Rocks Off isn't far enough on the road to enlightenment to maintain that kind of detachment, and going over the list of luminaries in the music world we've lost this year has us spending our nights brooding about the afterlife by the light of our Christmas tree.
Baba and crew seem to have the whole thing figured out to the decimal place, whereas most rock and rollers we know tend to regard death as something that happens to other people. Since we've gone this far, we figured we might as well drop the big question on The Dead Revolt.
What happens to us when we die?
"We respawn with 20 percent health and have to start the level over," says bassist Spencer.
"We shed our skins!" puts in drummer Dylan.
Baba was the most practical.
"I'm gonna bang Brittany Murphy."
The Dead Revolt play The Mink Thursday, December 23, with Rivers.
Jef With One F is the author of The Bible Spelled Backwards Does Not Change the Fact That You Cannot Kill David Arquette and Other Things I Learned In the Black Math Experiment, available now.