Best Band With the Worst Name

It’s a rule of thumb: Never include a musical genre in the name of your band. Metal groups with “metal” in their monikers? Bad. Punk outfits called the Punk Rock something-or-others? Even worse. Machine Gun Blues, though, never got the memo. Which sucks, because the quartet’s music is a writhing, scorching convulsion of blues rock that sounds about a hundred times more compelling than its handle. Whether MGB christened itself after the Nick Cassavetes movies, the venerable blues standard or the Smashing Pumpkins lyric, the fact remains: Machine Gun Blues, for the love of God and rock and roll, you need a new name.