Author Archives: jakemanson
Weird Band of the Week: The Radioactive Chicken Heads
Because you demanded it (no, really, one of you guys did), we decided to bring back polls to Weirdest Band in the World. Actually, we brought them back to our Facebook page, but close enough. And thanks to your tireless clicking, we have a new Weird Band of the Week: The Radioactive Chicken Heads. Pat yourselves on the back, people. I think you actually got this one right.
The Radioactive Chicken Heads are apparently from right here in Los Angeles (who knew?) and are a costumed punk band made up mostly of, well, radioactive chickens. They also have a lead singer who’s a carrot and a guitar player who’s a tomato. There’s an elaborate band mythology on the bio section of their website that kinda explains the whole thing, but we’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say that farmers and a giant, rampaging bunny are also involved.
Musically, the RCHs have a lot in common with other jokey punk bands like the Dead Milkmen and the Aquabats. They also sometimes seem like a children’s band, but other times not so much. Unless you’re the kind of parent who doesn’t mind explaining to the children who Ron Jeremy is. Yeah, that’s him slinging pizza in the video below.
P.S. Thanks to reader Chris Garcia for suggesting we add these guys to The Weird List.
P.P.S. Did we mention we now have polls on our Facebook page? It’s true. Go vote in the latest one, won’t you? (You’ll have to like us first, though. Don’t worry, we’re pretty low-maintenance.)
Links:
Watch Insane Clown Posse’s Hatchet Attacks festival live on Ustream
Insane Clown Posse + Pay-Per-View? Genius! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this sooner? If there’s one thing Juggalos love more than road-tripping to the middle of fucking nowhere to see their heroes live, it’s getting baked and sitting in front of their computers watching videos. Everybody wins.
Anyway, yeah, for those of y’all that can’t make it to Farmington, New Mexico on May 26th for ICP’s big Hatchet Attacks festival, you now have the option of watching the whole thing at home on Ustream for a mere $19.99. That’s only like $2.50 per act, or about one-tenth of a penny for every time you hear a “Woop! Woop!” At those prices, you practically can’t afford not to order the pay-per-view stream.
Check out the 10-minute infomercial (with ICP, there’s always a long-winded infomercial) for more information. And by the way, in case you’re curious, this is where Farmington, New Mexico is. Did you think I was kidding about it being the middle of fucking nowhere? I’m amazed they can actually transmit video from there.
Video: Dolchnakov Brigade cover the Muppets’ “Bein’ Green”
So we just heard from our buddy Yon Yonson, ringleader of the Moscow-via-Brooklyn synth-punk stormtroopers Dolchnakov Brigade, and apparently things are going well for them. They’ve been organizing flash mobs, getting booked on New York public-access comedy shows, and generally doing all they can to spread their message of “Palevish!” to the masses. Nice work, comrades! We hope your addition to The Weird List helped hasten your rise.
The latest and greatest thing Yon wanted to share with us is Dolchnakov Brigade’s latest video, a cover of the Kermit the Frog classic, “Bein’ Green.” Set on the mean streets of New York, it really brings home Kermit’s message of tolerance and mutual respect. Also, it’s a classic example of how most New Yorkers really couldn’t give a shit that there’s a dude painted green running down the street singing a Sesame Street tune.
Check out Dolchnakov Brigade’s “Upcoming Events” page to see where their quest for world domination is taking them next. Currently, it’s Harrisburg.
Here Comes the Mummies are playing the Indy 500
We’re not sure what mummies and auto racing have in common. But something about the stanky-sweet undead funk of Here Come the Mummies seems to have the folks at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway sold. After playing there last year for the 2011 Indy 500, they’ve been invited back for the 2012 edition of America’s most prestigious event that involves driving cars around in a big circle really, really fast. (So far, the only other confirmed musical act appears to be Lynyrd Skynyrd, who at this point are basically undead, too.)
I should probably point out that the Mummies are not playing the actual race itself, which happens Sunday, May 27th. They’re playing the “Pole Day Qualifications.” I was really hoping that’s some kind of stripper competition, but my one friend who actually cares about auto racing just burst my bubble and informed me it’s the day the drivers compete to see who gets prime position at the start of the race. “Pole Day” happens on Saturday, May 19th and unlike the Indy 500 itself, which is mostly sold out, you can still get tickets for it—for a mere 15 bucks—here.
The Mummies play the Coke Stage at 6:15 p.m. Wonder if Coke knows its corporate banners will be accompanied by a bunch of dudes in mummy costumes whose set list typically includes songs like “Attack of the Wiener Man” and “Libido Knievel”? We hear they do a “PG version” of their set for events like the Indy 500, though. Wouldn’t want to upset those God-fearing NASCAR fans. And yes, I know the Indy 500′s not NASCAR. Split hairs, why don’t you?
Let’s play this post out with a clip from the Mummies’ concert DVD, Undead Live. More cowbelt!
Bum Sick
I hope you’re not reading this on your lunch break, because you’ll either hurl or laugh so hard the special sauce on your Big Mac will squirt out of your nose.
This week’s band, Bum Sick, is a British grindcore band who do all shit-themed songs in which the vocals have been replaced with farting noises. And uh, yeah, that about sums it up, really.
Credit (or blame) for this disgusting discovery goes to our current MVR (Most Valuable Reader) Ian Frost and another fellow known only as Rapesbladder. Thanks, guys! We’ll think about you every time we drop a particularly noisy deuce this week.
A little background, even though you probably don’t need any: Bum Sick was started in 2009 as a joke (duh) by Andy Bile (aka General Ass Piss), bass player for a death metal band called Amputated and also the creator of a pornogrind band called Bukkake Birth. Don’t know what pornogrind is? Read this and all will be revealed. Don’t know what bukkake is? Oh, you sheltered little lamb. I don’t have the heart to burst your bubble. (Who am I kidding? Of course I do.)
Bum Sick have released one album, Smelly Noise (warning: cover art NSFW), which features such fart-tastic jams as “Shock to the Cistern,” “Swollen Colon” and “Diarrhea Snorting Crack Whore.” If they’re not Beavis and Butt-Head’s favorite band, they should be.
As far as I can tell, Bile seems content to just call this stuff “grind,” while others have lumped it into the pornogrind category. I’m proposing right now that we should start calling this shit scatgrind.* But please don’t credit Weirdest Band in the World if that term catches on. We don’t want to be held responsible if there are 100 shit-themed bands on ReverbNation by this time next year.
Bum Sick’s original songs are good, grossout fun. But for sheer video hilarity, nothing in their catalog tops this Hatebreed cover, set an actual Hatebreed concert clip. Enjoy.
*[Update: Turns out scatgrind is already so widely in use it even has its own Last.fm tag. Shoulda seen that coming.]
Links:
- Bum Sick on Facebook
- Bum Sick on MySpace
- Bum Sick merch (yes, they have T-shirts)
Watch Insane Clown Posse’s 19-minute infomercial for their new album, “The Mighty Death Pop”
OK, so you probably just read that headline and thought, “Dude, I couldn’t even make it through a 19-minute infomercial for Girls Gone Wild. How much Juggalo jackassery can I possibly take?” But before you totally blow off the awesomeness that is The Mighty Death Pop and its bomb-ass, Braveheart-length infomercial, check out these actual quotes from the video:
“…Dropping cluster bombs of flavor…”
“You like to take chances with your life? That’s good, because he like to pop deaths.”
“Version one has a red background, so we will call it Red Pop.”
“64 minutes of non-stop hoe flows!”
“…Special guests that will melt your brain until it seeps out of your ears…”
“It’s interesting as fuck.”
Now tell me you don’t wanna watch this shit. No, don’t tell me, cuz I don’t wanna hear it. Just watch, dammit! (Resist the urge to watch it stoned, though. Cuz then it really does have the power to stop time completely.)
So, to recap: ICP’s The Mighty Death Pop comes out Aug. 14th in three different versions. Also, the FBI now officially considers Juggalos to be a criminal gang. And white announcer dudes should never be forced to say “Efil4zaggin.” I think that about sums it up, actually. Maybe you didn’t need to watch the whole thing after all. My bad.
Tanzwut
Sometimes, it would be a lot more convenient if this site was called Weirdest Genre in the World. I mean, when you’re diving into the Renaissance-Faire-meets-Euro-Hesher world of medieval metal, how do you pick just one band as the weirdest? But after an all-night bender of bagpipes and drop-D tuning, I think I can safely say that Germany’s Tanzwut takes the crown.
Medieval metal traces its roots…well, technically to medieval times, I guess, but the whole let’s-mix-Ren-Faire-instruments-with-electric-guitars thing really got its start in the ’90s, when it became really popular in Germany for some reason. Among the first bands to do it was a group called Corvus Corax, who started out playing semi-authentic versions of medieval folk songs on traditional instruments like bagpipes, lutes and something I’d never heard of before called a shawm, which sort of looks like a wooden vuvuzela and sounds, as far as I can tell, pretty much like a bagpipe. (Instruments didn’t have tremendous tonal range back in olden days.)
Anyway, as a one-time experiment, Corvus Corax did a metal-influenced 1996 record called Tanzwut, but it was so popular that they eventually just spun the whole thing off as a separate side project, also called Tanzwut, which apparently translates to “dance-rage.” Only in Germany would there actually be a word for that.
In the years since, Tanzwut and Corvus Corax have evolved into completely separate groups. While Corvus still sticks for the most part to traditional medieval music, Tanzwut has become one of several bands mixing medieval instruments and melodies with a heavy (and sometimes more industrial) rock sound. There’s also the oddly named Subway to Sally, the much more appropriately named In Extremo, and a bunch more you can read about on Wikipedia if that’s your thing.
Again, nearly all these bands are from Germany, although there is one excellent medieval metal band from Italy called Folkstone, who a reader named Michael turned us on to back when we were expounding on medieval metal’s even geekier cousin, Celtic folk metal, back on St. Patrick’s Day. When it’s sung in German, medieval metal kinda makes sense in a bombastic, “Ride of the Valkyries” way. Sung in Italian, there’s something kind of insane about it. It’s like Andrea Bocelli trying to make an Anthrax record. (Side note: Michael has a nifty little genre-mashing project of his own called Blood and Banjos, a work-in-progress melding of black metal and bluegrass. Check it out.)
But back to Tanzwut. Lots of medieval metal bands like to play dress-up, but mostly they just wind up looking like the Capitol One vikings or Game of Thrones fans at Comic-Con. Tanzwut look more like a cross between Rammstein and the world’s scariest Burning Man theme camp, with post-apocalyptic pirate bagpipers and a lead singer named Teufel (“Devil”) who sports actual devil horns (OK, they’re just his hair, but still). They’re also one of the few medieval metal bands who can rock just as hard in an all-acoustic setup. Well, maybe not quite as hard, but dig those hands-in-the-air moves at the 0:28 mark. If you can find us another medieval bagpipe band with that much swag, let us know.
Tanzwut’s live shows look pretty epic, but I’ll leave you with instead with their latest music video, for the title track to last year’s Weiße Nächte (White Nights). It seems to take place in some parallel universe where electricity was discovered in the Middle Ages, but it was only used to power guitar amps and halogen worklights.
Links:
- Tanzwut official site (in German)
- Tanzwut on Facebook
- Tanzwut on MySpace
- Tanzwut fan club on MySpace
- Corvus Corax official site (English and German)
- Teufel official site (in German)
- Ardor official site (the most pirate-looking of Tanzwut’s bagpipers—site under construction and mostly in German)
Whoop! Whoop! Gathering of the Juggalos tickets now on sale
Break out the hallucinogenics and the black-and-white facepaint, motherfuckers. Tickets for the 13th annual Gathering of the Juggalos went on sale this weekend.
For those of y’all not familiar: The Gathering of the Juggalos is sort of the white trash, Midwestern answer to Burning Man, only with less hippie pretentiousness and more illegal fireworks, bad hip-hop and tit-flashing. Founded and hosted by clown-paint horrorcore rappers Insane Clown Posse, The Gathering takes place in a lawless corner of rural Illinois called Cave-in-Rock. Tickets will set you back $175 apiece, with additional fees for RV and car camping—which you will almost certainly want to do, because really, are you just gonna leave all your shit in a tent when you’re camped next to these people? They will smell the drugs stashed at the bottom of your knapsack the way a hungry grizzly smells a cooler full of hamburger patties.
The lineup for this year’s Gathering has yet to be announced, but that’s sorta beside point. The real point of the Gathering, as documented in the awesome short film “American Juggalo,” is to get fucked up with your fellow Juggalos and yell “Whoop whoop!” a lot. That being said, you can actually vote on who you’d like to see at the Gathering on the ICP website. Results of the poll guarantee absolutely nothing (i.e. you’re probably gonna wind up seeing Twiztid and Kottonmouth Kings again), but it’s fun to see who your fellow Juggalos are voting for. I’m probably not going, but I voted for Limp Bizkit, Naz (sic), Morris Day and Motley Crue anyway—the last three because they’re awesome, and Limp Bizkit just to be a dick.
This year’s Gathering of the Juggalos takes place Aug. 8-12 in Cave-in-Rock, Illinois. You can order tickets here (installment plan coming soon for all you broke-ass ninjas). Conveniently, ICP’s next album, The Mighty Death Pop, comes out just two days later on Aug. 14. Wonder if they’ll hype the shit out of it all week?
Metalachi in LA Weekly…with strippers
What’s Spanish for “fuck yeah”? Our favorite metal mariachi cover band is hitting the big time! Well, okay, not the big time, exactly—just LA Weekly. But hey, it sure beats a write-up on our crappy little website, so I’m sure they’ll take it.
This LA Weekly article doesn’t actually shed much light on the mysterious costumed quintet known as Metalachi. They stick throughout to their stage names (El Cucuy, Maximilian “Dirty” Sanchez, Vega de la Rockha) and their amusing but unlikely backstory about being five brothers from Juarez. Mostly, we’re linking to it because a.) Metalachi are awesome and b.) the whole article takes place at a strip club.
So what’s new in the world of Metalachi besides LA Weekly articles and strippers offering to do El Cucuy’s makeup? Well, see that sweet album cover art at the top of this post? That is Metalachi’s debut record, Uno, and it’ll be out any day now. Also, if you happen to read this in the next five minutes, you Los Angeles types can catch them at Skinny’s Lounge tonight in North Hollywood. Tell ‘em Jake sent you. I’d be there myself but I’m already drunk and I can’t find my keys.
Fly the really, really unfriendly skies: Black metal legend Euronymous could wind up on the side of a plane
We’ve always said that if there’s one thing the airline industry needs, it’s more black metal. I mean, what image emblazoned across the tail fin of a Boeing 737 could possibly make travelers feel safer than the painted visage of Mayhem‘s murdered leader, Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth, glaring down at the passenger cabin like a guardian demon from some especially cold, Norwegian circle of hell?
Thanks to an online poll currently being conducted by Norwegian, a discount Scandinavian airline (think Southwest, only the flight attendants have better cheekbones), the above scenario could actually happen. Norwegian is asking their customers to pick famous Norwegian people to grace the tail fins of four planes in their fleet, and currently, Euronymous is leading in the poll for the Oslo-based jet. If you want to get in on the black metal action, go here and cast your vote (the site’s in Norwegian, but the voting’s pretty easy to figure out).
Voters can submit their own candidates, but as far as we can tell, Euronymous was actually one of the famous people nominated by the good folks at Norwegian, which officially makes them the coolest airline on the planet. At least until Virgin steps up and puts Ozzy Osbourne on the side of one of their planes. No, wait, that still wouldn’t be cooler than honoring an avowed Satanist who was hacked to death by his own bass player.
Voting closes March 28th (aka this Wednesday), so get cracking. And a word of advice to Norwegian: If Euronymous wins, I wouldn’t puss out if I were you. Those Norwegian black metal people have been known to burn shit down when they get cranky.
(P.S. Big ups to Richard from Army of Gay Unicorns for alerting us to this story. You, sir, are the wind beneath our inverted-cross-covered wings.)
