You can go to shows for years and never see a Klingon play guitar.
Other niche bands might pay tribute to Middle Earth or Mass Effect, often dressing as characters onstage. Trekkie group Il Troubadore (who call themselves “Indianapolis’s 24th-century Klingon opera ensemble”) perform in full-face alien makeup, and Tolkien-inspired Finnish heavy-metal band Battlelore (currently on hiatus) wear chain mail and elven cloaks to sing about the Lord of the Rings. There’s even Twi-rock, in which teenage girls posting acoustic songs to YouTube channel the angst and sparkle of Stephenie Meyer’s divisive Twilight saga. But today’s vampires are yesterday’s hobbits, and bands can end up short-lived if a certain fandom goes out of vogue.
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The show has had a cult audience for decades. The London-based Doctor Who Appreciation Society was founded in 1976, and the Doctor Who Fan Club of America popularized the term “Whovian” in the 80s. The 2005 reboot of the series rejuvenated and expanded that following, and today you can buy BBC-official sonic screwdrivers and Dalek salt and pepper shakers at any respectable comics shop. Look around on the el and you’re likely to spot at least one TARDIS smartphone case. But despite its status as one of the longest-running shows on TV, this seminal sci-fi hit has inspired relatively little music making.
Time Crash’s beginnings were so casual as to almost count as accidental. In 2011, Northwestern University theater graduate Ronen Kohn, who’d been busking and playing local shows, started taking breaks from working on a folk-rock solo album called Cracks to obsessively watch Doctor Who. Kohn began to wonder how the show’s storytelling could translate to lyrics. “I was thinking that my entire brain is full of Doctor Who right now, and if I write any song it’s going to secretly be about Doctor Who,” Kohn says. “So then I thought, Well, why does that have to be a secret?”
It takes a while to come up with a set’s worth of songs, of course, but Time Crash had started writing material when Kohn and Kitsberg first met up, long before all five members were aboard; they made their live debut in September, just three months after the Rice brothers joined. Soon they were opening for fellow nerd rockers, including local video-game band Arc Impulse, at the Abbey Pub and the Elbo Room. Fans began showing up stageside in bow ties and suspenders, a nod to the current Eleventh Doctor’s dress sense.
Little Amelia [EP] by Time Crash
Singing about love, loss, and time travel, Time Crash won their bracket in the preliminaries and the semifinals. They lost in the finals—Phil Jacobson, the Rory Tyer Band, and Pirates!!! eventually played the fest—but the experience helped them feel like they’d begun to find their footing in the Chicago music scene. “To get that far with what we do—which a lot of people would see as a niche thing—is incredible,” says Kohn.
