Music

Top Ten Nerd Bands!

By Brent Chittenden

As I mentioned last week, I’m gearing up for Fan Expo this week. A weekend of video games, comics, horror, sci-fi, anime and everything nerdy and awesome and that’s including music. Nerd rock has gained more and more of a following because much like rock itself, nerd rock divides into many subgenres and styles. To help navigate this list, I got my good friend, Alex James from Toronto’s Nerds With Guitars, to give us the lowdown from someone within the scene. Here’s what he came up with (in no particular order)

Kirby Krackle

 

Full disclosure: these guys are friends of mine, but that doesn’t make them any less excellent.  In terms of nerd music they’re about as far from filk as you can get (they’re a five-piece rock and roll outfit from Seattle), but that gives them a unique, pop-flavoured edge that is well worth a listen or twenty.  Nerd cred includes songs as diverse as “Roll Over” (drunken night on the town with Saturday morning cartoon characters), “Up Up Down Down” (the dangers of dating in comic shops), “In Another Castle” (wherein Mario expresses frustration), and “One More Episode” (the joys of spending a weekend on the couch with a box set).  Really excellent stuff, very tight band, Nerdy As Hell.

 

H2Awesome

 

Nerd rock straight out of New York, these guys just released their latest record “Zero Charisma”, featuring an ode to everyone’s favourite swordsman (“Inigo Montoya”), the lament of sci-fi’s most famous father’s brother (“Uncle Owen”) and an honest-to-god theme song for the band.  Yes, they wrote and recorded their own theme song.  Zero Charisma my ass.  These guys put on an extremely eclectic and energetic live show, so if you’re ever on the east coast, I’d recommend you check them out.  (Oh, and their new album is PWYC on Bandcamp, too.)

 

Wordburglar

 

A local act from my hometown, Burgie might be the last word in rap-based nerddom (he is for my money, anyway), right up there with MC Frontalot, MC Chris, and Adam Warrock.  Now on his third studio album from Hand’Solo Records, the man rhymes with eloquence and ease about Star Wars, the joys of congoing, and his personal passion – comic books.  In fact, the video for “Rhyme O’Clock” was filmed at the now-former location of Toronto’s famous Silver Snail comic shop and featured a cameo by – of all people – Bramwell “Bram” Morrison of Sharon, Lois & Bram fame.  Oh, and if you can find a rapper that can make you want to eat a sandwich as much as Burgie does, I will be genuinely surprised. 

 

The Doubleclicks

 

Nerd folk is a thing, and Angela & Aubrey Webber have perfected it.  The Doubleclicks came through town this year and played at the Black Canary coffee bar to a crowd of enthusiastic nerds who thrilled to the sisters’ snark and sweetness.  As with Kirby, I’ll be straight with you and say these ladies are friends of mine, but I’m not heaping on false praise when I say their live show is not to be missed.  They’ve got something for every nerd subtype out there, from lit snobs (“Oh Mr. Darcy”) to dinosaur aficionados (“Clever Girl”) even to other musicians (“The Guy Who Yells Free Bird”).  They also spearheaded a super-cool video addressing the “Fake Geek Girl” nonsense and shooting it down through crowd participation from nerds the continent over (“Nothing to Prove”).  If they never venture north again they’re well worth a trip to Portland if you ask me.

 

Weird Al Yankovic

 

Al is the undisputed godfather of the genre, in the same way Neil Young is credited with birthing the grunge movement.  While Mister Yankovic doesn’t write traditionally “nerdy” tunes the way the rest of the people on this list have done, there’s not a soul can argue the legitimacy of his claim to the throne of nerd music.  This is a guy who should never, ever have been popular when he hit the scene in the early 80s (thanks Dr. Demento!) but he was, and continues to be to this day.  And frankly, if his music doesn’t sell you on just what kind of weirdo this guy truly is, I recommend you sit through “UHF”.

 

Jonathan Coulton

 

The *other* undisputed godfather of the genre, this former software engineer is perhaps most famous for penning the credits tune “Still Alive” for Valve’s staggeringly popular “sorry we haven’t made Half Life 3 yet” offering “Portal”, but that’s far from the only work he’s done.  In fact, he has hundreds of songs to his credit, largely due to the now-infamous Thing A Week project in which he tasked himself with writing, arranging, and recording a new song each week, every week, for a whole year.  The result was four studio albums’ worth of material including clever zombie-as-office-worker repartee (“Re: Your Brains”), a love song penned for Pluto (“I’m Your Moon”), a shout out to the father of fractals (“Mandelbrot Set”) and a charming acoustic rendition of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”, famously stolen by the producers of GLEE.  If you don’t know Coulton, we probably wouldn’t have much to talk about, you and I.

 

They Might Be Giants

 

Older readers of this post will remember TMBG from their debut in the early 80s.  Perhaps the original nerdy music duo (and one from which I certainly draw a large degree of inspiration), John Flansburg and John Linnell were truly unique among their peers, bringing a saxophone and accordion on stage with the traditional guitar and recording their first demo literally onto an answering machine.  While they’re probably most famous to the younger crowd for their cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” because of its inclusion in an early 90s episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, older folks like me remember the likes of “Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head” and “Hotel Detective”.  Long before being nerdy was deemed cool, TMBG was making it happen.

 

Hello, The Future

 

Nicole Dieker is a nerdy girl with a guitar and a set of big dreams.  Hello, The Future is the expression of those dreams.  Taking a cue from Coulton’s Thing A Week, she uploaded a new song to YouTube once a week for a shocking 100 weeks, and she’s been playing them (and writing new ones) ever since.  But she’s not just a nerd – she’s a socially-conscious nerd.  She single-handedly curated the “Mink Car Cover” album, a ten-year anniversary version of the original TMBG effort, and raised over $5000 to support the FDNY on the tenth anniversary of the Twin Tower attacks.  Her newest record, “Giant Robot Album”, was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign.  Nicole is a remarkable business woman in addition to being a lot of fun on stage, and if indy music is your thing, you could take a page from her “This Week in Independent Musicianry” series.

 

Paul & Storm

 

Veterans of acapella group Da Vinci’s Notebook, I first saw these guys opening for Jonathan Coulton at Enwave Theater a few years ago.  My first thought was “musical duo I’ve never heard of, opening for a hero of mine? I hates you!” and then they opened their song holes and started singing and I shut up and loved them ever after.  These guys can *sing*.  They also happen to be very, very funny: tunes like “Rejected Commercial Jingles”, “Irish Drinking Song” (recently featured on the soundtrack for Despicable Me 2) and my personal favourite “We Are The Opening Band” are melodic, lyric-rich, and full of nerdy (and non-nerdy) laughs.  It helps they’re also very nice guys – I got the chance to play with them in Seattle earlier this year, and they were super pleasant to us and a lot of fun to work with.  Oh, and their show “Learning Town” is the cat’s ass, and you should totally watch it.

 

Bowser & Blue

 

These guys are like the Canadian Paul & Storm – they’ve been touring for a dog’s age and might be one of the most bizarrely hilarious acts ever to hit stage in the great white North.  Their unique brand of absurdist humour, I assume, can only come from growing up in Montreal (maybe it’s all the poutine, I don’t know), but anybody who writes a song entitled “I’m In Like With A Dyke Named Spike” is okay in my books.  While not traditionally nerdy (like Weird Al), they are elder statesmen of the genre and definitely have a stake in where bands like mine came from.  Nerd references are one thing, but if you can’t sell a joke musically you might as well not even turn up because references + no humour = the later seasons of Family Guy, and nobody wants that.  Bowser and Blue perfected that and continue to do so to this day.  Definitely check them out.

 

Many thanks to Alex James and if you’re curious about his own brand of nerd rock, Alex and Nerds with Guitars will be performing at Nerd Noise Night, Saturday August 24 at The Horseshoe in Toronto along with Wordburglar, The Cybertronic Spree (who dress up as Transformers and play the soundtrack to the original Transformers animated film) and many more. You can get more details here.

Brent Chittenden

Brent Chittenden is a freelance writer with a gift for the geek. Currently a writer with A Journal Of Musical Things and a podcaster with True North Nerds, he's also written for Comic Book Daily, Explore Music and a dozen other places. Currently, he is the co-host of the True North Nerds podcast. You can find out more at www.facebook.com/bcchittenden

Brent Chittenden has 195 posts and counting. See all posts by Brent Chittenden

One thought on “Top Ten Nerd Bands!

  • I'd would totally include the band Nerf Herder in that list. They wrote and recorded the Buffy theme song and just look at these guys.

    Reply

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