Imagine the thrill of naming your band—dusting off that old notebook jam-packed full of names, a world full of possibilities. I’m sure there are some awe-inspiring gems in there… but that doesn’t make them ska-inspring. When it comes to naming a ska band, there are some fucking rules. Actually, just one: give us those puns!
You may pretend to cringe, but secretly we know you’re spamming your friends anytime you think of a “clever” portmanteau. You yearn for names like The Skatalites or The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. You want to see “ska,” “brass,” or “tone” forcefully crammed into a word, no matter the consequences. So let’s call out some celebrated ska bands with checkered naming pasts and help them pick it up.
Madness
Despite being hailed as “inventing ska” by fabled rock critic Ronald Thomas Clontle, we think they could’ve scaled to even greater heights with a more skapropriate name. Back in 1976, even “Reel Big Fish” was up for grabs—you could’ve probably even snagged the dot com—and yet, they settled for Madness? We can’t help but imagine what could have been if they’d picked something a little more sane.
How It Could Have Been Better: Inskanity
The Specials
The Specials, a name synonymous with the 2-Tone ska movement, formed in Coventry back in 1977. They masterfully blended reggae rhythms with punk’s raw edge, churning out hits that have stood the test of time. But let’s talk brass tacks: they couldn’t have jazzed up the name with a trombone pun or something? They’re iconic, no doubt, but their naming game leaves something to be desired.
How It Could Have Been Better: Extrahorninary
Kill Lincoln
Kill Lincoln? Talk about a mood killer. I don’t know about you, but that name screams THE ASSASSINATION OF A BELOVED PRESIDENT. Ska’s supposed to pick up spirits, not drag ’em down. Why not riff on some other, less tragic presidential history? (Grab some Kill Lincoln records from our store)
How It Could Have Been Better: Skanklin Roosevelt and The New Deal
Fishbone
Fishbone’s a household name in ska, but their choice of a fish name without a pun? That’s a missed boat in a skaquarium full of possibilities. Goddamn it, we just remembered Reel Big Fish is taken again. That’s okay. We’ve been casting for other names, and it seems we’ve caught one.
How It Could Have Been Better: Brass Pro Shop
Goldfinger
With a universe of Bond villains to choose from, there were so many options to shoot for, yet they missed the mark. We say it’s time they rebrand so fans stop remembering them just for that one song in Tony Hawk Pro Skater and start thinking of them as “The Band With the Golden Pun.”
How It Could Have Been Better: Francisco Skaramanga
Five Iron Frenzy
Five Iron Frenzy? Is that a golf name? Yikes. Alright, let’s work with this. Golf pun, golf pun… Skarnold Palmer? The Skand Traps? Yeah, something like this could work. We still need to think it over some more, but we do really want to give this band a mulligan.
How It Could Have Been Better: Mull Again
Catch 22
Emerging from the late ’90s ska scene, Catch 22 quickly asserted themselves as a standout force. The band wholeheartedly embraced the vibrant and energetic spirit of the genre, but they sure didn’t embrace the naming convention! We can fix this though. How about we give a nod to a different classic? Perhaps a J.D. Skalinger novel chock-full of skapportunity?
How It Could Have Been Better: Skatcher In the Rye
(Editor’s Note: Obviously the singer should go by Holden Skafield)
No Doubt
They’ve had plenty of hits, but this name is an absolute miss. It doesn’t even highlight that they have a superstar like Gwen Stefani in the band. I’m sure the other guys wouldn’t mind if she was spotlighted a little more from the start. It’s just good skadvertising.
How It Could Have Been Better: Gwen Skafani
Big D and the Kids Table
Big D? Geez, what in the eggplant emoji could that mean? It’s pretty childish if you ask us. Want to know what’s even more childish? Not following the rules. This band needs a name that speaks to a more mature audience.
How It Could Have Been Better: Saxual Magnetism
Operation Ivy
This one is going to be painful. We all love Operation Ivy. They may be one of the reasons we’ve found ourselves 20 years later, writing joke articles for a punk website about ska bands. It’s a name emblazoned on our denim jackets and in our hearts. But rules are rules. And while no one is going to like this, it has to be done. (Pick up some essential Operation Ivy records in our store)
How It Could Have Been Better: Skaperation Ivy
The Hippos
This may be the worst offender. There are so many ska-ready animals. Skanimals, if you will. Let’s skip the niceties and just say: how dare you. Here are ten better ideas off the cuff.
How It Could Have Been Better: The Skamingos, The Skaguars, The Skardines, The Skar Peis, The Skardinian Warblers, The Skabre-toned Tigers, The Brasset Hounds, The Cockatunes, The Kangarudeboys. Or just go with Skaquabats because clearly, someone missed that one.
The Beat aka The English Beat
The Beat? Not even a ‘beat’ pun? Just ‘The Beat.’ Ugh. Was ‘Music Band’ taken? About as creative as adding ‘tone’ to your name. I get that they formed ages ago, before puns were the backbone of comedy, but come on. They even had to go by ‘English Beat’ in the U.S. to avoid a naming conflict with another band. We need a name that is a pun but has never been used in America and certainly not in England.
How It Could Have Been Better: The Beatles (Note to self: Google to check if any of these band names already exists before publishing)
Streetlight Manifesto
When forming Streetlight Manifesto, members of Catch 22 got a second chance and still messed it up. Manifestos? That’s lone-wolf-in-an-isolated-cabin territory, not jamming-out-with-trumpets stuff. But hey, if they’re set on it, let’s lean into it, and pack it full of puns. Seriously, they should have consulted us for wildly creative solutions like this years ago.
How It Could Have Been Better: The Beatlight Manifestones
The Suicide Machines
They originally formed as Jack Kevorkian and the Suicide Machines. Oh my god, guys, how long are you going to dance around it?! It’s right there! I guess you just need us to assist you with this. (Check out our store for some Suicide Machines vinyl)
How It Could Have Been Better: Dr. Skavorkian
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies
They’re kinda ska, they’re kind of swing. Who cares? This is just an act of charity for the universe to select a new name. Their name is just… ugh, downright gross. I mean, did they pull that from a database of screen names on Chris Hansen’s computer? It doesn’t even have to be a pun. Let’s just think of anything less upsetting.
How It Could Have Been Better: Anal Skaunt
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If we would’ve left this gruff, pop punk adjacent 1998 release off the list, we would’ve gotten an amplitude of hate from your literally bitter tongues, as this selection is one of the most underrated of the bunch. It’s so underrated you probably haven’t even heard of it, which makes it cooler. Furthermore, you don’t have to read on if you don’t want more fuel sprayed on your ever-growing metaphorical fire, but we know that you and your masochistic and spiteful selves will!
Days Away’s truly excellent 2005 LP “Mapping An Invisible World” is truly the one that truly got away. After releasing several EPs, Langhorne, Pennsylvania’s own favorite sons signed to Fueled by Ramen Records, and was poised to become huge like several labelmates before them. Sadly for the world, things just never panned out that way; it happens. Despite selling tens of copies, a lot of your favorite bands revered and took great influence from this particular full-length, and if you had a chance to catch the band two years prior on tour with Something Corporate, RX Bandits, and Mae, you’re much more than an analog boy in a digital world. FYI: Check out Good Old War if you haven’t done so, but knowing you punk rock princesses, you spin at least one of their LPs every morning.
The difficult-to-pin-down-in-the-best-way band known as Forgive Durden justifiably gets a lot of flowers critically for their ambitious and final LP “Razia’s Shadow: A Musical.” However, the band’s debut studio album “Wonderland” deserves much, much more ears and much, much less words in its song titles, but we digress. Basically, if you’re in the mood for a combination of a Gatsby’s American Dream influence and a hearty dose of French Woods theater camp, this record is for you. In closing, like the first monkey shot into space, “Fight Club” jokes are knowingly and admittedly low hanging fruit, but maybe self-destruction is the answer.
Easily the worst band name on this list, Fairfax, Virginia’s The Friday Night Boys somehow defied the odds of said moniker and made a banger of a full-length known as 2009’s “Off The Deep End.” If catchiness is your forte, the album is filled with hit after hit. If it isn’t, you probably don’t like Smash Mouth, and should stop listening to music altogether. Furthermore, lead vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Andrew Goldstein the Easter Egger has been writing and producing bangers from bangable artists since the band went defunct for such huge acts MGK, Katy Perry, and even the greatest of all time, Celine Dion.!
Technology must be very far behind here, so we don’t have another answer as to why the hell this perfect ska-punk/third-wave LP from The Hippos called “Forget the World” isn’t on DSPs. PLEASE fix that John Janick and/or Vinnie Fiorello… Despite this release being the oldest mentioned here, 1997 wasn’t THAT long ago! Also, the alumni from this band is quite prodigious, so this particular album deserves so much more notoriety; Google the ninety-seven piece if you know how to do so, rudeboy/rudegirl. Anyway, the band eventually signed to a major label and added about 1999 keyboards to their lineup as ska was becoming less en vogue than a Salt-N-Pepa feature.
You should know that sadly passion isn’t always rewarded, and somehow Powerspace got lost in the shuffle with their more successful label peers Cobra Starship and Trace Cyrus’ not-so-surprisingly popular non-FBR band Public Transportation Stopping Place. Pity. As evidenced by our listings above and below, FBR had the power-pop/pop-rock/danceable but not like The BeeGees market covered in the late-90s/aughts, and 2007’s “The Kicks Of Passion” is somehow both the paradox of no exception and the only exception. Weird. Chicago is so two-plus years ago, and Powerspace certainly and unquestionably got the Windy City shaft.
Easily the most frenetic and heavy studio album mentioned here, Austin, Texas’ Recover released their debut LP “Rodeo And Picasso” via Fueled by Ramen Records in 2001 to a flurry of livejournal entries and at least one absoluteunk.net post from your mother’s deceptively heavy computer. Eventually signing with Strummer Recordings/Universal Records one full-length album later, the band sadly never rose to the heights of former tour mates My Chemical Romance and AFI, and imploded shortly after. Still, “Rodeo And Picasso” doesn’t get as much love as its Fiddler Records follow-up 2002 EP “Ceci N’est Pas Recover,” perhaps because of a combination of bad timing and its extremely pretentious-in-the-best-way album title. Young love is now old, so dust off your Kazaa mp3s for “Rodeo And Picasso,” and relisten twenty-two years later with noticeably hairier ears!
Imagine an early-aughts Patrick Stump (or Stumph if you’re feeling sinister and/or a stickler for accuracy) sang for Weezer for a song on the “Mallrats” soundtrack, and you’ve got The Stereo’s smart and succinct 1999 full-length “Three Hundred.” To add further credence to the Weezer love, this record opens with a song called “Devotion.” Mic drop for that deep cut and for us being smart enough to reference it. Yeah. Fun fact: This band formed in the wake of two ska-core bands Animal Chin and The Impossibles, and in an act of defiance against your acidic yet dulled senses, neither of which is mentioned any other time in this piece. You hate us so much everyday, so we might as well keep our priorities intact.
Flint, Michigan’s The Swellers’ 2011 studio album “Good For Me” is the most recent FBR record listed, and had a minor hit in “The Best I Ever Had” (just look at its lofty amount of YouTube views and even larger Spotify stream count), but sadly the band only recorded one more full-length afterwards before hanging their hats, and it wasn’t for FBR. Bummer, but they’d do it all again. Produced by Bill Stevenson of Black Flag/Descendents/ ALL and Jason Livermore of Wretch Like Me, “Good For Me” sounds like it was made by four kids who grew up loving Fat Wreck Chords’ compilations in the best way and saved a bundle on insurance by switching to Geico. Like Days Away, a lot of bands you likely dig privately dug this band publicly. Bummer: The Sequel.
Along with the also-underrated-but-sadly-non-Fueled-By-Ramen band Gob, Port St. Lucie, Florida’s VersaEmerge is one of the better acts to record the oft-covered song “Paint It Black”. While the band’s lone studio LP “Fixed at Zero” does not contain said Stones cover, it is a front-to-back lush cinematic masterpiece that will appeal to fans of the two-part conflict of interest conundrum of both Circa Survive and Saosin; bury your head and act appalled.
We heard that Juggalos are deceptively nice, but we know that Slipknot has influenced more bands than said ICP fans can count. One album legally had to be ranked last, and this 2008 Slipknot LP had to take the cold black cupcake. Still, even a “bad” Slipknot LP is good sans quotes, and “All Hope Is Gone,” despite being a disjointed listen with more figurative misses than literal hits contains one of their most beloved singles, “Psychosocial.” If you don’t know what psychosocial means, read on: According to Wikipedia, the gospel of truth, the psychosocial approach looks at individuals in the context of the combined influence that psychological factors and the surrounding social environment have on their physical and mental wellness and their ability to function. Say that three times fast; Slipknot = smart.
At first glance, “The End, So Far” reads like it is going to be a combination of a farewell/hiatus/cash grab LP and a greatest hits/rarities/B-sides album. Once one views the actual track listing, the fact that the band ended the twelve-track record and their shortest LP altogether with a song “Finale” may confirm the initial first half of our posit but cancels out the second half. Still, regardless of what’s next for the band 2023-beyond, this acidic release is ambitious with a capital “A” for Adderall, but isn’t as memorable as the following five for fighting. We hear that “The End, So Far” is the band’s last for Roadrunner, but something tells us that Wile E. Coyote may have something else up his sleeve.
Self-awareness alert: Album number five for the band is listed at number five here. Whoa. Hot take alert: If entries #7 or #6 contained the band’s best single of their career (this album’s “The Devil in I”) then our ranking list would’ve been different, and that’s NOT us being sarcastic. Yep. Furthermore, the gap between “.5: The Gray Chapter” and its predecessor “All Hope Is Gone” is the band’s longest between releases, and said delay was for the best, as heard in the songs here. However, we will likely be a devil to all of you skeptics and negative ones with this far-too-high or way-too-low ranking, as even if we listed these seven disasterpieces in the order that you agreed with, you’d still try to override and bitch, bitch, bitch. Tell us we’re wrong, but that will prove us right.
Despite being the only Slipknot release to come out during the critical darling/cum dump/surprising-also-not-surpising-hero-to-Christians/former game show host known as Donald Trump’s first and hopefully only presidential term, 2019’s “We Are Not Your Kind” is the band’s best album to come out after 2004, and truly deserves more praise as an entity. We know that old-school phonies who claim to be Slipknot heads will likely scoff at this modern record’s high placement because what is new always sucks. Always.
Welcome: The famous or infamous trilogy starts now, and we’re kicking it off with its end, the bronze-medalist known as Slipknot’s monster LP “Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses). Self-awareness alert part deux: Album number three for the band is listed at number three here. Valid. Whoa and hot take alert part deux: Albums 3-1 have NO “skip it” section. Nil. Before we get into the specifics of “Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), we’d like to remark that we’re still unsure why the “subliminal verses” verbiage in the (actual) album title is in parentheses. Anyway, the legendary Rick Rubin produced this specific Slipknot record, and his epic beard shows such brilliance in the songs! So, so good and so, so brutal. We’re likely going to shock/disappoint/cause a double take next, but that’s just par for the course.
The whole thing WE think is sick, the whole thing WE think is sick: We’ve been not-so-casually waiting to perish by bleeding out for this specific placement since the start of this article since none of you Slipknot-obsessed readers reading this surprisingly/unsurprisingly readable piece has a life. Still, this record is one of the finest metal/metal-adjacent. Slipknot stormed the gates of the aggressive music community with their self-titled debut LP in 1999 and twenty-four years later is still rocking your faces and masks off. All nine members of the band infected your ears from this album’s beginning at second one to the ending at sixty minutes and fifteen seconds, and it still holds up today. Wear your t-shirts with pride and get ready to scream “Are you reeeeeady” like the band’s peers in Trust Company.
Last hot take here as there is no room for any more plague-inducing scorchers that will forever cause us to be hated: “Iowa,” as an album title but not as a state, should get slightly more love than “Slipknot,” as an album title but not as the band itself. That was truly a mouthful, but speaking of that region, we don’t envy Corey Taylor’s throat after recording this guttural, guttural studio album. Since 2001, the vocalist for Stone Sour’s voice has never sounded the same, and while we rightfully praise his pain and effort, we can’t legally vouch for others trying to do the same to their respective voices: Sing gently, singers, as everything ends. In closing, “Iowa” is the polar opposite of a sophomore slump and deserves a revisit twenty-two years later.
