Megafauna, The Yeti Of Texas Prog-Rock Bands

It's a well-known fact that most band names are essentially gobbledygook, but here at Rocks Off we're trying hard to unravel the meanings behind some of the odder monikers.

​Sooooooo... Megafauna is this way trippy experimental rock act out of Austin who will be here annihilating Walter's tonight with their incredibly varied approach to music. Vacillating between angelic vocals and being punched in the breadbasket by a fist wrapped in tri-tones counts as variety, right?

Well, you can go to Walter's tonight and find out whether your innards will become your outtards from the mad phatness of Megafauna's music, but that's not what we're here to talk about. What sent Rocks Off into our typical blind and badly-spelled rage was their name. What the hell does Megafauna mean? The simple definition by Professor Wikipedia is that megafauna is any animal over 100 lbs.

At first we called bullshit that this designation deserved as awesome a term as megafauna. Hell, our three cats standing on each other's shoulders would count as megafauna, or at least a hit YouTube video. Then we started clicking around the links and found out, holy shit, yeti count as megafauna! So does an (allegedly) extinct 15-foot carnivorous duck from Australia!

​Standing corrected, we fired off an all-capslocked series of queries to Megafauna.

"Any animal roughly larger than a human is megafauna," said lead singer Dani Neff. "I think that music and taking time to go out and perform for people is a somewhat higher calling, and necessary to remind people that despite a lot of pressure to go out and find a comfortable job, it's important to have people going out and pushing self-directed endeavors.

"Thus what we are doing is larger than the average human, in my opinion."

That's throwing down a pretty hefty gauntlet made of giant ground-sloth hide there, little missy! Did you see that you're putting yourself in the same category as yeti? We admit, the music you make is pretty heavy.

It's definitely got brontosaurus balls, what with the wacky, all-over-the-place beats and combination of jam-band laid-backness with indie-pop appeal. What megafauna can you claim as your avatar?