The FuMP Artist Blog - Nuclear Bubble Wrap

Bonhoeffer’s

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 01:00:00 -0500

Show at Bonhoeffer’s went pretty awesomely! Thanks to everybody who came out and saw us! The crowd was great, and we played a lot of new songs that seemed to be well received. Sorry we didn’t have more free CDs to hand out. We’ll definitely fix that next time!

Setlist (click to download songs!)
In Space No One Can Hear You Scream
Lizards in the Sky
Radiation Mutation Transformation
Hulkulele
Burning Ambitions
Worms
Gypsy Eyes
Sharktopus

And of course, higher quality paid downloads also exist.

In Retrospect: Miyazaki Pig

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 01:00:00 -0500

In Retrospect: Miyazaki Pig

Being a nerdy guy and being somebody who likes to write songs is an odd combination. I ended up making a lot of songs that happen to be about things I like. In high school, I wrote songs about all kinds of things I was a fan of, like Harry Potter, Pokémon (see I’m enough of a nerd to use the é thing)… I even wrote a song about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But the way I’d been approaching this kind of songwriting changed over time. I started out by making songs that were simply about that thing. Like a summary. This is the Weird Al influence, of course. People know him for making songs about Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Spider-Man… and they’re awesome filk songs. I would write songs like that, but later on I tried being more “clever” with it, rather than just describing the thing. And this is one of those.

Is it clever? Well maybe for an aspiring 18 year old songwriter/Weird Al wannabe. But these days I look down on a song like this. Not too much, though. After all, writing songs like this sort of pioneered my direction of trying to actually write from the heart. Except I would take my emotions and shower them with Studio Ghibli references. But I listen to it now and it just doesn’t have any real emotional impact. It reeks of trying to be clever without actually being emotionally captivating. I feel like “Raichu a Song” (another song written with this same sort of idea) suffers from the same issues. I realize people like these songs because of funny references. I just feel like I could do these types of songs better if I did them today. The music of Jonathan Coulton inspired me to make more interesting songs and I think “Kenny’s Lament” and “Hulkulele” from our Abracadaver EP pull this off kinda better.

This song came about partially because of my new found love for Studio Ghibli movies at the time (thanks, Brandon), but most notably the films of Hayao Miyazaki. He’s pretty great, a lot of people know this. I noticed that pigs seem to be a running theme in his movies and other things he’s involved with, so that’s where the title comes from. I ended up overloading the song with references to Studio Ghibli movies, and so I came up with the lyrics based around the titles. Which is pretty obvious. This song also came about because I was just about to leave for college, and there was a girl I liked who I knew I wasn’t going to see for a while after I left. So I wrote this “I’ll always be your miyazaki pig” to mean something like “I’ll still be around to see you.” Or something. Man, it sounds kinda dumb when I actually say it. The lyrics are kinda stupid. Lots of cheesy stuff, and lots of weird ways of shoehorning Ghibli titles in ways that don’t make a lot of sense. Man I could do this song idea way better today. But it’s okay. I view this song mainly as a simple songwriting exercise that was cute at the time, but I look back on it as a song that doesn’t hold up too well. It’s just missing something.

Musically this song isn’t that great, but I don’t think we really knew what we were doing back then anyway. It sorta has a Weezer vibe to me, which makes sense because Kyle and I both liked Weezer then. That violin in the chorus is interesting though. I regret that it isn’t more prominent in the mix. The melody is also really weird… I don’t think we had much of a grasp of that back then either. I like the snorts in the second verse, though.

For the record, here are the Ghibli movies referenced in the lyrics:
Whisper of the Heart
Spirited Away
Princess Mononoke
Castle in the Sky
Only Yesterday
Ponyo (on the cliff by the sea)
Ocean Waves
Grave of the Fireflies
My Neighbor Totoro (catbus)
Howl’s Moving Castle
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Porco Rosso (pig who flies a plane)
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Tales from Earthsea
The Cat Returns

Lately I’ve been limiting the amount of songs like this that come out of me. I know these types of songs are kind of a niche thing (especially one like this). And I just get ideas now that go way beyond these. Sometimes I still can’t help myself (the new album will have a song about Adventure Time) but overall my nerdy-type songwriting has become more about intergalactic space battles and educational songs about how black holes work.

This song is available on the EP “You Are What You Eat” which you can find on iTunes. Though it isn’t very good.

Halloween Filming

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 01:00:00 -0500

We’ve been hard at work filming a music video for our song “The Halloween That Came Before November the First.” The idea for this video was brought on by our good friend Victoria Womack, who will hopefully continue to work on videos with us in the future. Since we started developing ideas for the video around Halloween of this year, it worked out that we were able to do some filming on Halloween and got some good legitimate trick or treating going on in the shots! Kyle (who does lead vocals on the song) plays a deranged guy who goes around kidnapping children on Halloween and stealing their candy. These pictures are from our 2nd day of filming, and involved covering Kyle in copious amounts of fake blood. The shower ended up looking like a murder scene, as you can see.

There’s also this baby costume… well, in some of the shots, Kyle chases a baby around as he screams for his life/candy. And that baby… is me. It should be pretty funny. So here’s an embarrassing picture of me in a diaper, putting on a trench coat so that I wouldn’t have to walk around outside exclusively dressed up like a baby.

The Halloween song can be downloaded right here, too.

Lizards in the Sky

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 01:00:00 -0500

A new song from our next album!

Lizards in the Sky

Okay so imagine like, in some galaxy like a bazillion million lightyears away, there exists a planet. And that planet is similar to Earth but instead of life evolving by the way of mammals being the dominant intelligent lifeform, it did with reptiles. And since we’ve evolved to think of a mammal’s facial structure as something pleasant to look at, we can assume that a lizard person would evolve to do the same for the way they look. But we kinda think they’re weird looking and kinda ugly, just as they would think of us. So these lizard people find us one day and decide that we’re so ugly and weird looking that they wanna wipe us out, and we think the same of them. So we get intergalactic species warfare! Yaaaaaay!!!

Jace McLain: vocals, keyboards, percussion
Kyle Thorne: guitars, bass, vocals
Eric Zhu: drums

A Song About Fish

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 01:00:00 -0500

Hereâ��s a new song, kinda! Following in the footsteps of our cover of â��Birdfuckerâ�� hereâ��s a new version, with lyrics about fish! They were written by Andrew Kepple (animator of Avada Kedavra and Draining the Lizard) and Iâ��m really sorry this exists. This oneâ��s not for sensitive ears.

Fishfucker