Take Austin’s Megafauna and San Antonio’s HoneyBunny, who will perform together Saturday, May 13 at the Paper Tiger. The gig will serve as the release party for Megafauna’s latest LP, Olympico, while HoneyBunny’s dropped a new album of its own, Be Cool, earlier this year.
Megafauna finds inspiration in the grunge and arena rock of Nirvana and Soundgarden, and, for its part, HoneyBunny draws sonic elements from pop acts of the era, such as TLC and No Doubt, while simultaneously taking oddball visual cues from Bjork.
In other words, Megafauna wants you rocking out while HoneyBunny wants you dancing. Openers Powered Wig Machine, from San Antonio, don’t have an apparent ’90s lineage, but surreal humor never goes out of style, apparently.
While united in their love of ’90s music, Megafauna vocalist-guitarist Dani Neff, HoneyBunny singer Bridgette Norris-Sanchez and their respective bands clearly have different artistic approaches.
Neff admits Nirvana was her gateway drug to rock ’n’ roll, although she grew up listening to blues.
Her interest in Nirvana and its Seattle brethren blossomed into an obsession after reading Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross. Growing up in preppy Fairfield, Connecticut, the grunge genre encapsulated Neff’s feeling that “no one understands me.”
“I loved grunge. My sister introduced me to grunge and MTV,” she said. "Superunknown [by Soundgarden] is one of my favorite albums.”
Despite some similarities in riffery, Megafauna don’t particularly sound like Soundgarden or, for that matter, Nirvana.
For one, Neff’s vocals are more reserved than Chris Cornell’s rock god howling. And — more importantly — the band’s rhythm section works in a busy, aggressive style far from Soundgarden stickman Matt Cameron’s and bassist Ben Shepherd’s more foundational approach.
“I started writing songs because my guitar teacher told me, ‘You can just choose random chords and write a song that way,’” Neff said, laughing. “That spirit of experimentation was there from the beginning.”
Neff formed Megafauna in 2008 with bassist Will Krause, though he left from 2011-2015 after the pair dated for a year. But he’s back, and you’d never know there was a past schism in listening to Olympico. Rounded out by drummer Zack Humphrey and guitarist-keyboardist Winston Barrett, the group plays with a tight synchronicity that can only come from hours of practice.
Neff — an attorney and the mother of a toddler — initially faced music-biz sexism, though that lessened as the band gained success.
“At first, I’d show up and the sound guy was like, ‘Are you the girlfriend?’” Neff said.
Olympico was born of a collaborative spirit, even if the foundation of many of the songs come from Neff’s proclivity for creating riffs. Drawing on a collection of ideas that went back years, she showed songs to the other band members, who developed their own parts.
“I’ve always started with riffs. If you look at my phone, I have hundreds of voice memos with song ideas,” she said.
Despite Megafauna’s big rock elements, the underground heaviness of Sleep and Dead Meadow also slip into the mix. They latter aren’t Neff’s favorites, but “people always say we sound like them.”
HoneyBunny was born in 2019, more than a decade after Megafauna. Frontwoman Norris-Sanchez had always wanted to sing and finally worked up the courage to ask her partner, guitarist Bobby Rivas, to collaborate.
“We were dating almost a year before we started doing music,” she said. “I had these songs written.”
The pair frequently collaborate on the tunes, though Rivas at times will contribute pieces that are close to complete. Norris-Sanchez sometimes roughs out her compositions on a ukulele, allowing Rivas to suggest additional parts.
“We tried out a lot of different sounds,” Norris-Sanchez explains. “It was me and Bobby and a laptop. I’m influenced by a lot of R&B from the ’90s and I like to sing. We tried all different kinds of things. We got inspired by different things and wanted to change our sound.”
She added: “Our sound today is eclectic, but we still like to rock. It’s like if ABBA had sex with the Dead Kennedys.”
Such an odd comparison shouldn’t be surprising coming from someone who admits being heavily into Bjork as a teenager.
HoneyBunny is currently performing as a six-piece featuring an additional guitar player, a drummer, a bassist and a keyboardist. Expect an undercurrent of funk or disco groove since Norris-Sanchez loves it when people get down and let it out. No Doubt, after all, was another of her teen obsessions.
The band’s new album, Be Cool, was recorded locally at Studio E with the basic tracks laid down in a single night. However, following an exodus of band members, Rivas ended up rerecording many of the parts.
Norris-Sanchez and Rivas hope to play a run of Texas shows by the end of the year to promote the release.
“We all get our ideas from movie scenes,” Norris-Sanchez sings in “Forever” from the new album, and the band’s name HoneyBunny references Pulp Fiction, a movie that defined ’90s cinema. So, what’s that obsession with the silver screen all about?
“It has to do with happy endings, of happiness being a place where everyone should end up,” Norris-Sanchez said. “Even though that’s basically a lie.”
While Rivas is a full-time musician, Norris-Sanchez works as a cake decorator, a vocation that fits the band’s aesthetic.
“We’re kids of pop culture. We don’t like to be boring, and I love being loud,” she said. “I’m inspired by drag, and I love to wear glitter. And sequins.”
$15, 7 p.m. Saturday, May 13, Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary's St., papertigersatx.com.
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