The Baby Stompers is one of the most important Death Metal bands of the new millennium. Formed in the better secondary school in a backwater town in Australia in early 2010, the band released the rare demo, titled Stomping the Baby Demo, which consisted of an early version of their crowd favourite, "Stomp". This song was their more traditional approach to the death metal genre, and is seen by many of its fans as a ‘proto-Baby Stompers’, particularly as it is co-credited to Jacob Van Andel (best known for the crowd favourite epic dark ambient song "Incredible") as a solo artist.
From this approach they immediately entered the left field, producing classic after classic of unusual music featuring less traditional death metal elements such as ambient wails, jazz ensembles and eclectic spoken word passages. The Baby Stompers never failed to surprise, elegantly crafting track after track of fascinating, captivating music. The use of expletives in their music, such as in crowd favourite "Fuck", of which nearly every lyric is ‘cunt’, and references to anal sex and bleeding induced therefrom are common elements in their music, as far as any element in such an eclectic and surprising band can said to be ‘common’!
From their opening EP, The Taking a Shit EP, which many fans know comes from the demo title of fan favourite "The Joy of Masturbating", "The Pain of Taking a Big Shit", the band’s fanbase was cemented. Aggressive touring followed, with The Baby Stompers often playing three hours of music at up to three clubs a night. As they were young, most of the concerts were improvised, and every single concert has been recorded by the fans, being traded eagerly. Before his death by misadventure (the accident has never fully been able to be explained, especially by the members of the band themselves) at the age of twenty-seven, former third drummer Johnny Fuck would enter the crowd after concerts to hunt down bootleggers and attack them. The band’s often violent relationship with its fans was perhaps best exemplified when, famously, the entire band once lynched a fan who called them ‘not metal’. In spite of this, band support remains strong. When the drumbeats of crowd favourite "Ted" is heard, the entire crowd screams ‘Stompaz’ and in return main founder Kevin Morris throws bottles of beer into the crowd good-naturedly.
The ensuing years were remembered by few, least of all by the members of the band themselves. In a similar outlook to that on Woodstock, at which the band played twice, the view is held that ‘if you remember it, you weren’t really there’. Fans blame Jacob Van Andel’s famous three days of sobriety for what is commonly held to be an abominable decline in the quality of their music midway through the nineties. Firstly, the introduction of an acoustic guitar into fan favourite blues-thrash epic "Wanking a Bleeding Heart" was nearly universally panned, but the indescribable vitriol the fans felt for their former heroes was only exacerbated by their commercial success on the release of their first video clip, for fan favourite jazzcore epic "Sperming on a Ruptured Fish Anus", which controversially featured primarily Van Andel ejaculating on a ruptured fish anus.
The band’s next release was a Greatest Hits Album In Name Only, ostensibly drawing from their material from the 60s, 70s and 80s, though in actuality was merely the Taking A Shit EP with seven new songs, including a rerecording of crowd favourite "Stomp": The Baby Stompers All Time Classics of the 60's, 70's and 80's. This album sold well, though fans noted that on the same day as it was released a new mix of fan favourite "F16 or How I Learned about Male to Male Sexual Relations from that Weird 40 Year Old Guy at Summer Camp When I Was 8 Years Old in the Back of His Ute, I Was Dressed in a Small Petite Dress and Covered In Vaseline Before the Police Pulled up. This Led to Me Buying a MacBook Pro and Writing Depressing Indie Songs about my Sexual Sexperiences and that Seedy 40 Year Olds Should Not Be Trusted". was released, causing fans to believe that they had been slighted. TV Tropes strongly urges fans to collect all releases by this band, as only by exploring their immense back catalogue can a true appreciation for The Baby Stompers be found.
The most common voices heard on The Baby Stompers’ music are those of Morris and of Jacob Van Andel. Van Andel’s history with this band is a complex one: he initially recorded a demo with the young band, only stepping into a main role after crowd favourite frontman Armstrong committed suicide when he was twenty-seven. Van Andel is often credited by the fans as introducing the intrinsic death metal elements which remain a core component of the band’s music to this day.
Then, with new members Ted and Dylan, The New Album: The Mowcore Era was started, with The Baby Stompers complete as they are today. About halfway into the recording of the album, the band became bored and instead worked on the presently (and likely forever) unfinished Death Metal EP, the Wanking The Baby EP. This included their most famous track, Sperming On A Ruptured Fish Anus.
Eventually, The New Album: The Mowcore Era was completed, minus one track which has been lost forever, "Crusty Milk".
The Baby Stompers released one last album before their breakup near the end of 2011, titled, fittingly, The Last Album: It's Finished. This album contains one track, "We Can't Be Fucked (Fuck You)" and, despite the dubious title, is a real, heartfelt farewell from a glorious, mad band.
After their breakup, if anything The Baby Stompers became more prolific. Several projects are in the works, including ""Walrus": The Walrus Single" and "Death Metal Zebra", and a ten song single has been released for "I Wanna Sex Up A Crying Charmander In His Sexy Butthole While Jerking Off His Two-Inch Floppy", a song which heavily references Pokémon and is principally about molesting Charmander.
The Baby Stompers has an official Facebook page here
, with several songs available for listening.
Members
- Kevin: Kevin, the founder of the band, manager and vocalist. Known for his ego and habit of firing members of the band on a whim. One of the most powerful influences on the band's style and lyrics.
- Jacob: The metalhead, second vocalist and the band's primary instrumentalist. (For the most part the band writes their music with GarageBand.) Jacob brings stronger influences to the band's music.
- Ted: Ted, the "groupie" and "only guest vocalist to have survived the hells of the recording studio". Eventually became a member of the band, and began having a larger role in the second half of The New Album: The Mowcore Era.
- Dylan: The quieter one, with a razor wit. Less is known about him than about the others, but he was responsible for "Acid And Party (feat. Dylan C)".
Discography
- 2010 - Stomping The Baby Demo
- 2011 - Taking A Shit EP
- 2011 - The Baby Stompers All Time Classics of the 60's, 70's and 80's
- 2011 - The New Album: The Mowcore Era
- 2011 - Wanking The Baby EP (Unfinished and unreleased)
- 2011 - The Last Album: It's Finished
Contains examples of
- Added Alliterative Appeal: From Fingering The Mother Bear:I found the cave was full of bears. Big, burly brown bears. And one bitch, well that bitch was the biggest brown burly, busty, buxom big-boobed bear I'd ever laid eyes on.
- Bears Are Bad News: Or good, good news...
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Often the members of the band narrate the song - "This song is so fucking brutal. Fuckin' hell"; "We're approaching the finish, cunt" - and refer to its finishing (see Call-Back below for more details).
- Call-Back: That's Gravy, Dick - which was the last song recorded properly with the band -
references several other classic songs:- The original line "That's a cow dick" from Cow Dick has been referenced with the lines "That's a gravy dick" and "I put gravy on my dick; I guess that's a fuckin' gravy dick, isn't it - ya cunt".
- The classic end to Mowing the Lawn - "It's gone!" (referring to cancer that has been mowed out of the narrator's lungs) is referenced with "It's gone!"
- Forbsey Freestyles is quoted here "Thanks for that!" as well as in Ben, Fuck with "Everybody listen up this way please. Thank you."
- Many songs, including the last song ever recorded by The Baby Stompers, We Can't Be Fucked (Fuck You), contain the line "It's finished". Beautifully, the last album has this in its title: The Last Album: It's Finished.
- A Day in the Limelight: "This is a song... by Ted. It's about... themes... and - and fuckin' dragons, and trolls and shit."
- Hilariously, in the background at one point you can hear:I hate you, Ted. Fuck off.
-
- Either/Or Title: "F16 or How I Learned about Male to Male Sexual Relations from that Weird 40 Year Old Guy at Summer Camp When I Was 8 Years Old in the Back of His Ute, I Was Dressed in a Small Petite Dress and Covered In Vaseline Before the Police Pulled up. This Led to Me Buying a MacBook Pro and Writing Depressing Indie Songs about my Sexual Sexperiences and that Seedy 40 Year Olds Should Not Be Trusted".
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Guess what happens in Sperming On A Ruptured Fish Anus. Or Wanking The Baby. Or Fingering The Mother Bear.
- Genre Roulette: Songs are more or less written as entirely separate from one another. Though the claimed genre of all but The New Album: The Mowcore Era is Death Metal, in reality the band alternates between Country Music, Rock & Roll, Blues, Jazz and of course Death Metal roughly on a song-by-song basis. The most cohesive effort was the Wanking The Baby EP, being all Death Metal and, by virtue of containing only one track, the Stomping The Baby Demo and The Last Album: It's Finished.
- Intercourse with You: This pops up a lot in The Baby Stompers' work, largely anal sex. The song "Ted" is about the narrators receiving anal sex from the eponymous Ted (Ted! Stick your big dick up my arsehole! Ted! It's bleeding... ah... So painful...) - though presumably not at the same time; F16 is about an eight year-old being anally raped by a forty year-old man according to the title, with the lyrics referring more so to sex, often anal, in general; "Cheese Grater (Grate My Nipples)" deals with an intensely bizarre lesbian sexual encounter that gets steadily more ridiculous.
- Irony: "Mowing the Lawn" is about using a lawnmower to accomplish everything but. Everything but. The one time mowing the lawn is actually mentioned...Didn't know the petrol ratio. Fuckin' couldn't mow me laaaaaawn...
- Also, the song "Family Values" is about incest.
- Lyrical Tic: There are many examples of random 'fuck!'s and 'cunt's tossed in
- Metal Scream: Several in "Sperming On A Ruptured Fish Anus" and "Wanking The Baby", as well as throughout the rest of the band's catalogue, especially when it doesn't fit.
- Incredibly Long Note: The eighteen second "cuuuuunt" in "So I Found This Vibrator There On eBay, Once".
- Scare Chord: The intro to Fingering The Mother Bear is full of these, largely for Rule of Cool.
- Scatting: A lot of the songs feature this to a minor degree.
- Serial Escalation: The scale of the unusual activities in "Cheese Grater (Grate My Nipples)" just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. It starts with coprophagia and goes from there (the eponymous nipples, bitten off early in the song, end up blended - as in, with a blender).
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Eclesiastic Sacerdotalistic Padre.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: All the friggin' time. The songs are largely mellow (with the exception of the Death Metal songs) and some pretty horrifying/disgusting things go on, all very matter-of-fact. The bluesy ones exemplify this the best, particularly the last parts of F16, for example: you get a male voice complaining about anal bleeding while a male in bad falsetto wails in a not-very-background way, all over soothing blues.
- Squick: We'd be here all day if we attempted to catalogue every example. The title of the "Wanking The Baby EP" should give you a hint.
- "Family Values" and "Cheese Grater (Grate My Nipples)" have every single lyric as this, intentionally so.
- Stylistic Suck: The vocals are intentionally low quality, but this trope especially applies to the album artwork, all of which comprises images crudely edited together in Macromedia Fireworks.
