Otis the Destroyer

One Liner:  Local dudes bashing their way into my heart with rock and roll

Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia, gonna say rock and roll, alternative rock, psych rock
Home: Austin, Texas

Poster Position: 21

Weekend One Only.

Thoughts:  Where have you been all my life, Otis?  This is the crunchy, cocky, raw rock and roll fuzzbox party that I needed after the last few bands.  And they're local!  A slight tinge of the psych rock feel to the tunes, but overall, this is just some scuzzy rock and damn roll.  Great backend bass and drums giving a groove, while the guitarwork goes from grungy rhythm to soaring solo in a heartbeat.  Also, in high school I named my two wooden lacrosse sticks Vlad the Impaler and Red the Destroyer (for all of my weird, purported originality, Red just had a maroonish red head), so I feel like these guys speak to my childhood as well.

That being said, their stream counts are criminally low, so I may be on an island over here.  One song with more than 20k streams, and most of their others are at less than 10k.  Their top two streaming tracks come from a 2014 Dark Arts EP, with "Gravity Something" being the top track at 23k streams.

This is the one that gives off a little bit of surf/psych vibe to go with the rock and roll.  You could see old (two albums ago) Tame Impala putting out a track like this.

The band is made up of four dudes from the Austin music scene who had been in other bands and bounced around some - lead singer/guitarists Taylor Wilkins had been in a band called Couch.  The original name of this band was Belushi, but then they changed it to the current (much cooler name) after a dog Wilkins had, who was apparently a destroyer as a pup but then mellowed out into a good boy.

They have one real album - 2017's Keep Bashing.  The top track off of that whole album has just over 5k streams, so this thing isn't lighting the modern music world on fire.  This is "Monster Eater."

Somebody needs to take these dudes under their videographic wing and help make them a couple of good YouTube videos to go with their tracks.  I've heard that video is the future.

Then, they put out a new EP in April 2019, with very little streaming action so far, but the top track thus far is the title track, "Cool Evil," which only has 1,972 streams, but I bet I'm 12 of those already.  Live version here, but you'll definitely get all of the bashing flavor.

Not much for lyricism of anything, but the rock and roll jam is what I crave.  "Red Witch," from this same EP, is also a good one, almost adding in some Teenage Fanclub drone/squal in place of the Nirvana bash and soar.

This is the good stuff.  Gimme sommo.