Devil Killing Moth: Butterflies With An Attitude

It's a well-known fact that most band names are essentially gobbledygook, but here at Rocks Off we're trying hard to find meaning in the oddest monikers.

​It has been a sad bastard and kill 'em all kind of week on Rocks Off's iPod. A little Blitzen Trapper's "Black River Killer" here. Some Nick Cave over there. Oh, and a whole lot of our own Devil Killing Moth.

Too put it bluntly, DKM is the kind of music you listen when you don't care if the sun ever rises again. Dual guitarists Dan Oviedo and Anton de Guzman wander all over the acoustical wasteland laying additional waste to the good cheer of men with their spacey vocals, talk of brothers' blood being spilled, and basically making music as heard through a warped amp of regret.

We dig it. After all, this shit ends in tears anyway. But that name...

Devil Killing Moth? What the hell does that mean? You can't throw a moth at the Devil. He's the devil. The devil is supposed to be this huge black goat with an enormous hymen-smasher.

​He's got, like, magic and a pitchfork and contracts that read like lease agreements and shit. Moths are just emo butterflies. Except Mothra, of course but that's trademarked. We don't endorse adding copyright infringement to Japan's woes, DKM. You'd better not.

In the end, we were forced to hike all the way to the top of Mount Houston, where we found Oviedo eating a sandwich. Panting, we asked him where the name came from.

"One day I had a very obscure dream," says Oviedo.

"Was it where you wake up and find you've been turned into a cupcake?" we asked.

"No."

"Why are we the only person who has that dream? Never mind. You were saying..."

"I couldn't make much sense of it, but it had a very unusual shape and image, as if in a moment where I couldn't really find the right words to describe other than the thought 'Devil Killing Moth.'"

Rocks Off gets a lot this kind of thing when we delve into band names. Granted sometimes the "dreams" could more accurately be referred to as chemically induced lapses of reality, but one man's meth is another man's Strawberry Quik.

Nonetheless, we've started trying to learn some dream interpretation to further explore the names we tackle.