Branding

Back in October, I picked up an album by a band called Family.  Family is a four-piece from Brooklyn who play a mix of modern metal, based on proggy, odd-time riffs, grounded in classic rock with hints of post-metal, all delivered with the sludgy/post-hardcore screams that seem to be dominating the genre these days.  Since metal journalism hasn’t seemed to develop the vocabulary necessary to truly describe the various acts that play some form or another of extreme music, general descriptions are based around comparisons to known bands.  Descriptions of Family have included the names Mastodon, Baroness, Unsane, Tool, and Rush.  It’s an odd mix, but it works.

Since getting this album it has been growing on me.  Over the past three and a half months I’ve continued to go back to it, selecting it to listen to over others.  To put that into perspective, since adding it to my library last Halloween, I’ve purchased a dozen other albums and EPs and this album’s frequency in my rotation has outpaced all but one.

My interest has led me to start looking for interviews with the band to get more information, and that’s where the problem lies.

Like most people of this era, if I’m looking for something I start with a search engine.  Search engines are really useful tools as long as what you are looking for is fairly unique.  The name Family is not.  If you search at your favorite search engine, say Google, even with the tracked and targeted search results searching for Family does not get you the band.  Generally, when I come up against this issue I start by appending the word “band” to my search, but “family band” is a bit too generic to identify the band.  Adding Brooklyn to the search doesn’t make the results any better.  Finding out news on the band is tough if you don’t already know where to look.

I contrast this to another band I’ve been listening to a lot lately called Grayceon.  In an old interview I read with them the inevitable question of, “how did you get your name?” came up.  They wanted to name the band after a stray cat that lived behind one of them who was named Grayson.  With Grayson being so common, they built off of that until they came up with something unique.  When they entered Grayceon into Google and the search returned no results, they knew they had their name.  Now, when I search Grayceon on Google, other that Google thinking I mistyped “grace on,” it returns only information about the band.  They’re easy to find.

To complicate the Family matter, the band named their debut album Portrait.  Googling “family portrait” does not bring up reviews of the album; certainly not in the first several pages of results.  Searching for “family slays” brings up the band’s own website, but that’s the kind of thing you’d already have to know.

While Family does in fact slay, they’ve done themselves a disservice by picking such a common word as their name.  They are hard to find, but completely worth it.  Check out some of their material here:

http://familyslays.bandcamp.com/