Shirt Stains: Do You Really Want To Shirt Me?
No themes, just pain. I guess that’s kind of a theme? The theme this week is pain.
Intros are overrated. Let’s just get to making fun of bad shirts.
Hey, it’s Raven. You know Raven. They’re that band that always gets mentioned on lists of “other” NWOBHM bands like Diamond Head and Tygers of Pan Tang. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. Not every band can be Black Sabbath, though plenty of modern bands still try. Maybe they would have had better success if they didn’t have such shite shirts. I’m kidding, of course, but still, look at this thing. Collage images can be real hit or miss. Each picture has to be great and not look utterly ridiculous when put together. The front of this shirt manages so miss the mark on both points.
The guy on the left looks like he’s choking the raven and is shocked at what’s happening. His hand isn’t shown, so maybe he’s just rubbing his stump on his junk. Gross. Also, his skin is roughly the color of a ripe tomato. We have a picture of a drummer, whose arm looks like it should belong on a grandma screaming “Bingo!” at the local community center, not actually drumming. His skin color looks like it was taken from Andreas Serrano’s “Immersion (Piss Christ)“. Dude on the right would be fine except for his tiny baby hands.
If we’re being honest though, it’s the back of the shirt that makes me die a little both inside and out. “STILL THE WILDEST F***IN’ BAND IN THE WORLD!” That sentence is like biting into your favorite food and discovery that the consistency is completely wrong. Raven is so wild that they’ve censored their own shirt. Maybe it was the band, maybe it was the label, who knows? The point is you can’t exactly say you’re wild while simultaneously watching out for potty talk. They would have been better off putting nothing on the back. Hell, they would have been better off just putting their tiny baby hands on the back.
Mago de Oz have already appeared twice in Shirt Stains and their crap merch train just keep on rolling. It’s like the band is gunning to be the third guarantee in life, just beyond death and taxes. This shirt has a cheap Halloween decoration trying out for Eluveitie. Her face is all “I’m going to get you my pretty!” but her body is all “I don’t exist for some reason and my hands aren’t attached to to anything!” Hey, at least htere’s a nice little skull on the bottom right for some reason.
Anyone else think it’s weird that a Spanish band has an album called Celtic Land? It might just be me. Anyone else think it’s weird that a Spanish band has an album called Celtic Land and the artwork looks like this? Yeah, that’s what I thought. The shirt isn’t an all-over print, it looks like it wants to be. The design gets pee-shy near the arms. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy they had the sense not to be all-over, I just worry that they’re a four-leaf clover binge away from it.
UGH! Every time I look at this shirt I find something else to hate. The hideous amalgam of ManBearPig and the Party God from Adventure Time. His dumb face. The piercing. The unnecessary Devildriver symbol branded on its forehead like some sort of a Benton-come-lately. The pot leaves. It’s just…sigh. I guess I should be grateful that they kept the shirt to just black and white. They could have easily made it look like a unicorn just used the shirt to clean off after a solid round of “rubbing the horn”.
It all pales in comparison to one of the stupidest lines on a shirt I’ve seen in recent memory and remember, I do Shirt Stains on a weekly basis. “DAB WITH THE DEVIL”. It’s so stupid it makes me forgive them for using that old-timey cowboy saloon font. Like, clearly you all suffered various traumas in your life to bring you to this point, so you’re getting a pass on this one. Sometimes you have to let some of the small mistakes go while dealing with the gigantic travesties in front of you. Get outta my rowboat, Devildriver.
Do we think this was just a regular wolf shirt and someone slapped Sonata Arctica’s logo on it or did the band specifically ask for this picture? Same question with the tie-dye. Either way, this shirt probably received hundreds of 5 out of 5 star reviews on Amazon.
This is the shirt of failed comedians still doing open mics twenty years after they should have given up. This is the shirt for people that say “derp”. This is the shirt for people that have a stick figure family decal of their Sims family. This is the shirt for people that laugh whenever they hear “That’s what she said.” This is the shirt for people that download tons of music, but get pissed when their album shows up on torrent sites. This is the shirt for outlaw metal alphas.
“We have both kinds of bland, boring, generic Slayer hoodies: Country and Western.”
