UNC bands experiment with quirky genres

UNC student bands play types of music that aren’t in the Billboard Top 100, like meaty southern folk, feminist punk rock or experimental jazz noise.

Julia Klein, a junior communications major, said Crystal Tit, her all-girl progressive punk band, formed in December because they were frustrated with UNC’s male-dominated music scene and wanted to talk about women’s issues through music.

“That’s kind of where our sense of empowerment comes from,” Klein said. “Us getting together, being able to make a lot of noise and being women, is how we can make a statement with our music.”

Crystal Tit’s music covers a range of socially relevant topics, such as LGBTQ issues. One of the group’s songs, “Girls,” is about a woman who realizes she is gay.

Another of Crystal Tit’s songs, “F*ck Frat Court,” expresses its frustration with fraternities.

“We tend to talk about fraternities and their problems in a really serious setting, informally, when we talk about sexual assault,” Klein said. “To be able to bring that kind of frustration with frat culture into music and be able to scream about it and be mad about it emotionally, I think that’s where the power of that song comes from.”

Klein said she and her bandmates love performing and practicing together because it’s an emotionally cathartic experience.

“But I love playing our song ‘No Signal’ because in the middle of it, we just dissolve into literally banging on our instruments and trying to be as loud as we can,” she said.

Klein said she doesn’t know what the future of the band is after college ends, but that practicing and performing is one of the highlights of her week.

Junior Christian Cail is in a jazz-influenced noise experimental band, Hostile Merger. He said he uses his experience with performing to express himself.

“I’m just kind of a misanthropic person in general and in a lot of ways this music is sort of a very primal call to being authentic and mad and kind of primal,” Cail said. “And ugly. It’s a genuine attempt to be ugly, I think.”

Hostile Merger typically plays at house shows. Cail said the performances are high energy, intense and can slip into “pure anarchic madness.”

“I think we’re able to maintain an interest and an aura that somehow allows for all the bullshit to be permissible, which is always surprising,” Cail said. “I’m always thinking, ‘I really don’t know how anybody enjoyed that.’”

Cail said he doesn’t think Hostile Merger will be together after college because of the different directions all of the band members plan on taking. However, he said he’s not willing to give up the unique energy Hostile Merger has.

Dissimilar South, another band of UNC students, has an unconventional southern folk sound, and their venues have ranged from the Student Union to a wine bar in Beaufort, North Carolina.

The band started off as a group of friends that just goofed around with instruments their first year, and gradually became Dissimilar South. Senior Rebecca Chaisson, a geography major and member of Dissimilar South, said the band’s original content tends to be political, because most of the band members are not male and identify as LGBTQ.

“The majority of our life experiences tend to be politicized, and so content-wise, we’re writing about our lives and our experiences but it tends to have a kind of edge to it,” Chaisson said.

Chaisson said three of the members are seniors, and Dissimilar South might stay together after graduation next Spring.

“So I think we’re all kind of surprised where we’re at right now, there are different venues reaching out and asking us to play and just the level of support we’ve received has been really pleasantly surprising,” Chaisson said.

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