Arsonists Get All the Girls

Supposedly started as a joke band of sorts, Arsonists Get All the Girls became more popular than its members’ more serious projects. A sampling of songs from the group’s catalogue doesn’t make the joke immediately obvious, because these guys sound like a serious death-metal band, with electronic sounds stitching everything together in quiet moments. What happened was that the members realized they were using their talent just to make themselves laugh when they could be using it to create a band worth pursuing. Not that AGATG is without humor — witness song titles such as “Claiming Middle Age a Decade Early” and “The 42nd Ego” — but the music is the kind of technically proficient death grind that most bands of their ilk only dream about making.