Author Archives: jakemanson
Dwarr to tour for first time ever
That so-called Black Sabbath reunion? Whatevs. Van Halen + DLR? Fuck that shit. The biggest hard rock news of the year is this: Muthafuckin’ Dwarr is going on tour, bitches!
Yes, Duane Warr, the world’s most reclusive ’80s lo-fi doom-metal auteur, is actually leaving his South Carolina garage behind and hitting the road for a sadly brief but still bound to be fucking epic four-city tour. You can catch him in the following cities with Black Bananas (great name) and Magik Markers (less great, but we’ll accept it):
Saturday, May 12 – Austin, TX @ Red 7
Sunday, May 13 – Houston, TX @ Walter’s
Tuesday, May 15 – Atlanta, GA @ 529
Wednesday, May 16 – Durham, NC @ The Pinhook
Beyond that, we really don’t know a goddamn thing about this tour. Who besides Duane—a one-man band in his home studio—will be rocking it out under the Dwarr banner? Will the set list consist mainly of classic cuts from his recently reissued cult-classic albums, Starting Over and Animals, or does he have new material to unleash upon the masses? Are all his publicity photos (like the one above) from 1986, or has he really not aged a day in 26 years? Will anyone actually show up to see him in Durham? So many mysteries waiting to be unraveled!
We shall leave you with this recently unearthed and totally amazing video from Animals, circa 1986. If MTV had put this in heavy rotation instead of “You Give Love a Bad Name,” high school might have sucked less.
GWAR on politics: Oderus Urungus endorses death to all candidates*
Friend of the site and Weird 100 occupant (currently at No. 25) Army of Gay Unicorns recently brought something pretty sweet to our attention: The website Gawker has been collecting presidential endorsements from various metal bands. Damn, with we’d thought of that. We’ll have to settle for stealing some of their artwork (above) and linking to their “Metal Endorsements” feature. Check it out…it’s good shit, and proves (so far, at least) that Ron Paul is the most metal of all presidential candidates.
But the most metal of all endorsements came, not surprisingly, from Oderus Urungus, frontbeing of costumed shock-shredders GWAR. Oderus’s take on this year’s presidential candidates? They all suck, and all deserve to meet a grim, untimely demise:
“Simply put, all the offered choices are so nauseatingly banal that there is no flavor I favor….They all suck so bad that I cannot begin to do anything other than reject everything they stand for, and can endorse no party or candidate so much as I heartily cry for their destruction, lust for them to be tasked and scourged with fire and whips, and yearn to see great clouds of insects set upon their genitals.”
You can read Oderus’s entire non-endorsement, which also includes something about a “gigantic wheel of over-sized knives” (sounds like a future GWAR concert prop to us), over on Gawker. Candidates, consider yourselves warned.
*This whole thing is a joke, and neither Oderus nor Weirdest Band in the World endorses actual death to anyone. Not even Rick Santorum.
Weird bands on St. Paddy’s Day: Naked & Shameless in Long Beach, Extreme Turbo Smash in Denver
If you plan on celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in either Denver or Long Beach, California (or Tha LBC, as us hood rats like to call it), we’ve got great news for you. You’ll have weird bands playing! Sorry, Rest of the Earth. As far as we know, you’re shit out of luck.
Those of y’all in Denver can celebrate that proud Irish tradition of getting fucked up to thrash-style metal played by dudes in furry animal costumes. Yes, Extreme Turbo Smash, America’s best and (as far as we know) only furrycore band is on the bill at KBPI’s Shamrocks and Shenanigans party, along with a bunch of bands we honestly never heard of before but we’re sure are pretty excellent by Denver standards. It all goes down at the Summit Music Hall starting at 4 p.m. and—get this—tickets are just $1.67. You’ll actually save money by going—just think of all the porn you won’t be downloading while you’re out of the house! (Or maybe that’s just me.)
Meanwhile, in Long Beach, St. Paddy’s Day revelers can get serenaded table-side by California’s drunkest acoustic kitsch-rock duo, Naked & Shameless (that’s them in the pic above, in all their kitsch-rock glory). They’ll be playing an early set at 4 p.m. at Max Steiner’s. It’s a sports bar, so you can stay for March Madness and sober up (or keep drinking for all I care…I’m not your mother).
However you celebrate the patron saint of the Emerald Isle, have fun and don’t do anything (too) stupid. Let’s play this post out with a nice little N&S drinking song, shall we?
Waylander
Usually, we don’t get to post much around St. Patrick’s Day, because we’re too busy dodging drunk hipsters and scarfing down free tacos at SXSW. But we’re skipping the Austin trip this year, which means I finally have a chance to honor the patron saint of Ireland with a discussion of one of my favorite obscure subgenres of heavy music: pagan Celtic folk metal.
1993 was year zero for this stuff. That year, apparently by sheer coincidence, three bands popped up that came to define the sound: Cruachan, Primordial and Waylander. Cruachan is probably the most “traditional” of the three, mixing melodies and instruments swiped from Irish folk music with a classic headbanger sound. Primordial is more of a straight-up black metal band that only sounds Irish if you pay attention to the lyrics. But for my whiskey money, Waylander was and is the coolest of the three, since they sound like a knife fight between Sepultura and the steerage band from Titanic. Tin whistles have never before sounded this awesomely evil.
You might think heavy metal inspired by the music and history of pre-Christian Ireland would be a limited field, but there are actually a shit-ton of bands from all over the world who mix some combination of “pagan,” “Celtic,” “folk” and “shred” into their music. Some of the most Celtic-sounding ones aren’t even from Ireland…take Eluveitie, for example, who are from fucking Switzerland of all places and sound like some kind of horrendous mix of the Chieftains, Evanescence, Enya and your kid brother’s shitty screamo band. Technically, I suppose their clash of styles is even weirder than Waylander’s, but I don’t wanna piss off St. Patrick by picking a non-Irish band for this week’s feature.
Two other Celtic metal bands worth mentioning, just because they’re fucking awesome:
Mael Mórdha have been around almost as long as the O.G. Celtic metal bands, but they describe their sound as “Gaelic doom metal,” which basically means they sound even more evil than Waylander. They once appeared on You’re a Star, which is sort of an Irish version of The X Factor, with predictably sad/funny results: The clueless judges forced them to play a cover of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” before sending them packing. (It’s immortalized on YouTube, if you’re into watching noble Irish metal bands humiliate themselves before the gods of television.)
Celtachor are the new kids on the Celtic metal block, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say they rock the hardest of anyone in the genre yet. Give this track “Rise of Lugh” a spin and tell me it doesn’t lay waste to all before it.
Still, I gotta give the weird props to Waylander this week, for being one of the first bands to come up with this stuff, and for still rocking it nearly 20 years later. As I write this, they’re back in the studio hard at work on their fourth album, Kindred Spirits, which they plan to release later this year. I hope they’ll take a break this Saturday to down a pint of Guinness or five.
Bonus video! Here’s a clip of Waylander’s live show. That guy playing mandolin and tin whistle would probably be wearing a kilt if they made one big enough to cover the gigantic balls it must take to play mandolin and tin whistle in a metal band. Oh, and I guess kilts are Scottish, not Irish. So there’s that, too.
Links:
The Gerogerigegege
We’ve known about this week’s weird band for a long time, but honestly, we’ve put off writing about them because they’re disgusting. But it’s been a slow week, so I’m finally gonna bite the bullet and tell you about the perverse world of The Gerogerigegege. If you’re not ready for the gay avant-garde Japanese version of GG Allin, stop reading now.
Still with me? Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. The Gerogeri (as I’ll start typing from here on out, because I’m a lazy American) was founded in 1985 as a punk/noise band by Juntaro Yamanouchi, the son of a classically trained Japanese pianist with a fondness for cross-dressing and live Ramones albums. Besides making music, Yamanouchi also sometimes performed in S&M shows at gay clubs, which is where he met fellow S&M performer Tetsuya Endoh, aka Gero 30 or Gero 56. I’ll let Yamanouchi himself, in a badly translated interview, pick up the story from here:
“The contents of the show was nothing but to eat each other the shit of GERO 30 and mine and twist about in our pee and shit. While we played such performances, the audience, mainly middle-aged people, was jacking off. Anyway, all we could hear in the darkened space was panting voices of such men and excited snorts. Such experiences, beyond all description I could give, has been made most of the time in the pieces and lives of THE GEROGERIGEGEGE.”
“Gerogerigegege,” by the way, roughly translates to “Vomitdiarrheackackack.” So yes, much of this band’s music (for lack of a better word) is based on bodily functions. Sometimes pretty overtly so.
So with Gero 30 and a rotating cast of additional bandmates in tow, Yamanouchi and The Gerogerigegege began playing the Japanese punk clubs, where they soon became famous for shows that sometimes included pissing, shitting and vomiting onstage, and nearly always included the spectacle of Gero 30 jerking off. And when I say he was jerking off, I don’t mean he was just quietly rubbing one out behind the drum riser. He was more likely to be standing on top of an amp with a vacuum cleaner hose attached to his naughty bits. In fact, the most notorious Gerogeri video in circulation depicts just that. (Don’t worry, the naughty bits are scrambled.)
Yamanouchi and co. churned out a ton of material during the 15-odd years of the band’s existence…everything from full-on industrial noise to more abstract, ambient stuff to Ramones-inspired proto-punk. (Yamanouchi counts off the start of nearly every Gerogeri song with a Dee Dee Ramone-like “1, 2, 3, 4!”) Their most famous album, 1990′s Tokyo Anal Dynamite (that’s the cover art gracing our site this week…nice, huh?), featured 75 songs delivered in just over 30 minutes—although pretty much the only way you can tell when one song ends and the next begins is when Yamanouchi yells “1, 2, 3, 4!”
In addition to traditional album and single releases, The Gerogeri were also famous for pulling prank releases like Art Is Over, which consisted of an octopus tentacle glued to the inside of a cassette case, and “Ai-Jin,” a flexi-disc single that was presented at a “Release Memorial Performance” at which all 2,000 copies were burned. (About 25 copies allegedly survived and are now worth a lot of money, if you’re into that sort of thing.)
There’s probably no way to age gracefully after jacking off onstage for 15 years, so it’s no surprise really that both Yamanouchi and Gero 30 mysteriously disappeared shortly after the release of the band’s last album, 2001′s Saturday Night Big Cock Salaryman. Rumors abound as to what became of them, but no one really knows for sure. Many have pointed out that Gero 30 would be pushing 70 by now, so he’s probably spanking his monkey to Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs in some old folks’ home. As for Yamanouchi, he’s either dead, in a mental institution, or living under an assumed name somewhere. Or maybe he’s in the Seychelles partying with Jim Morrison.
It used to be almost impossible for anyone who wasn’t a collector of “Japanoise” rare vinyl to hear what The Gerogerigegege sounded like, but thanks to the miracle of YouTube, a big chunk of their catalog is now there for the listening. (Video of their live shows is rarer, unfortunately.) This clip from Tokyo Anal Dynamite is only 23 seconds long, but it sums up what they were about pretty neatly. It’s called “Boys Don’t Cry,” but it’s not a Cure cover. At least we don’t think it is, but with this band, it’s hard to tell.
- the gerogerigegege: 56k performance (fan site, last updated in 2003)
- The Gerogerigegege on Facebook (fan page)
- The Gerogerigegege on MySpace (fan page)
Weirdify Playlist 5: Mental Metal
What’s up, weirdos? Jake here, ready to melt your face off with our latest Spotify playlist. This week’s theme: Heavy metal, in all its skull-crushing, finger-tapping, demon-growling glory. Plus one sensitive grindcore piano ballad, because we know how those grindcore kids love the lighters-up moments.
Fire up your Spotify and strap in. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
1. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, “Helpless Corpses Enactment.” I’m not letting you people off easy this week. I’m throwing you right into the deep end of weird metal with a track from this sadly defunct San Francisco outfit, who did things to heavy music only a pretentious bunch of Bay Area art freaks could do.
2. Demon Tool, “La Naissance du Mal.” I’ll be honest: I found this track when I was looking for something from Tool. But it turns out Tool has licensed exactly zero of its catalog to Spotify, so you’ll have to settle for this obscure band that just happens to have Tool in their name. Plus, they sing in French, which is kinda weird in this context. It’s hard to sound demonic when you’re growling in the language of love.
3. Mayhem, “Buried by Time and Dust.” The original and greatest Norwegian black metal band. This track is from their classic 1994 album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, which means you’re hearing dead guitarist Euronymous playing alongside the man who murdered him, bassist Varg Vikernes. Creepy, huh?
4. Mr. Bungle, “Everyone I Went to High School With Is Dead.” Even when Mike Patton isn’t breaking out his operatic banshee shrieks, Mr. Bungle’s spin on heavy rock is still pretty out there.
5. Goblin Cock, “Kegrah the Dragon Killer.” Goblin Cock is what happens when indie rock nerds try to do a stoner metal band—they shred, kinda, but in case the band name didn’t tip you off, the whole thing’s pretty tongue-in-cheek. The head indie rock nerd is this case is Rob Crow from Pinback. I also had to include a Goblin Cock track because I ripped off one of their totally awesome album covers as the lead image for this playlist. Hail Satan! And/or the well-endowed, Satan-like figure seen in most Goblin Cock artwork!
6. Powerglove, “Heffalumps and Woozles (Winnie the Pooh).” More nerd-metal, this time from a bunch of dudes from Boston who do heavy instrumental versions of songs from videogames and children’s cartoons. Yes, this really is based on the “Heffalumps” song from Winnie the Pooh—if you don’t believe me, here’s the original. Okay, it’s a loose interpretation, but still. Those Heffalumps will fuck your shit up.
7. Schwarzenator, “Predator.” This is slightly less nerdy than songs about Heffalumps and dragon killers, but not by much. Schwarzenator are one of three, count ‘em, three metal bands whose songs are all based on Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. I would include tracks from ArnoCorps and Austrian Death Machine, too, but one Ahh-nuld-themed song per playlist is really my limit. Get to da choppuh!
8. Bang Camaro, “Swallow the Razor.” Pop-metal with a “dude choir” of about 15 singers. If more ’80s hair metal bands had employed dude choirs, maybe we’d all still be listening to Skid Row and Whitesnake to this day. Oh, wait, some of you are still listening to Skid Row and Whitesnake? Well, then maybe you wouldn’t be doing it in your parents’ basement.
9. Dir En Grey, “Lotus.” Japanese prog-metal. Any questions? No? Moving on…
10. Common Grackle, “At the Grindcore Show.” You know how some metal albums have a nice little ballad or acoustic interlude before they return to their regularly scheduled face-melting? This is sorta that track. It also nicely sets up our next few grindcore(ish) tracks.
11. Cattle Decapitation, “Gestation of Smegma.” Technically, I guess these San Diego dudes aren’t true grindcore, but a related genre called goregrind. Whatever. All I know is I’m really glad most of their songs are less than one minute long.
12. The Locust, “We Have Reached an Official Verdict: Nobody Gives a Shit.” Another San Diego band (featuring ex-Cattle Decap drummer Gabe Serbian), The Locust also aren’t technically grindcore, but an even more distantly related genre called powerviolence. And you thought the dance music kids liked to split hairs over genre distinctions.
13. Iwrestledabearonce, “Alaskan Flounder Basket.” Again, not really grindcore…they’re more screamo/experimental…oh, fuck it. Just prepare to be ear-raped.
14. Horse the Band, “A Million Exploding Suns.” I had to throw these guys in here because they play yet another obscure/bizarre subgenre called “nintendocore,” which is basically hardcore + videogame music. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried, people!
15. GWAR, “Black and Huge.” This one needs no introduction. It’s fucking GWAR! Bow down, human scum.
16. Super Geek League, “Naked Machine.” These Seattle freaks call their very GWAR-like funk-thrash-punk sound “soul metal.” I just call it my soundtrack for breaking stuff.
17. Apocalyptica, “Enter Sandman.” Metallica, played by cellos. This shit cracks me up every time I hear it, but I’m pretty sure they’re serious. They’re from Finland, so it’s hard to tell.
Hope you dug this week’s playlist. Tune in next week (or the week after, we’re not really on any set schedule with these things), when my partner Andy returns with Music for Pussies.
The Cowbelt: Now available for human use, from Here Come the Mummies
Good news, mortals! The Cowbelt, that formidable piece of musical crotch gear, once available only for Mummy use, can be now strapped to human hips for a variation on the cowbell so funky, Christopher Walken himself would weep to hear it. Your pelvic thrusts will be so funkified, members of both sexes will go weak at the knees around you. Or maybe they’re just doubled over in laughter. Who can tell? You’ll be so busy ringing your Cowbelt, you won’t fucking care.
For those not familiar with the awesome power of a fully operational Cowbelt, we offer up the following video of its creators, Here Come the Mummies, in fully Cowbelt deployment. Brace your ass, cuz it’s gonna wanna move.
Can’t wait to strap one on now, can you? So go order one of the first 100 from the HCTM website. They ship March 30th—a day the earth will probably wiggle on its axis from the sheer funkiness of it all.
More Cowbelt!
New Peelander-Z single: “Star Bowling”
A new tune from our favorite Japanese action comic punk band, Peelander-Z, graced our inbox over the weekend. It’s called “Star Bowling” and it’s from the band’s new album, Space Vacation, which is coming this April on Chicken Ranch Records. “Star Bowling” is less spazzy, more bouncy than previous Peelander joints—it even includes a pretty violin interlude that’s more like something you’d hear from Arcade Fire or the Polyphonic Spree. But we’re digging it.
A video for “Star Bowling” directed by the Zellner Brothers is coming soon. In the meantime, check out the track below and tell us what you think.
Impaled Northern Moonforest
Hey kids, it’s Weird Wednesday! Wait, it’s Thursday? Man, I really should write my Weird Band of the Week posts before I start drinking.
Anyways…this week’s weird band was suggested to us by a reader named Samuel, who noted that we had omitted the world’s first and greatest acoustic black metal band, Impaled Northern Moonforest. INM was started around 1997 as a joke by members of the band (and I’m really sorry for having to type this name) Anal Cunt, a grindcore group from Massachusetts. To the untrained ear, grindcore and black metal sound pretty similar, but the grindcore kids hate the black metal kids as only siblings can—especially when one of those siblings (black metal) is really into facepaint, Satanic imagery and flashy prog-metal guitar solos.
According to Impaled Northern Moonforest lore, the band was originally meant to be a full-blown black metal project, but it turned into an acoustic deal because another of the Anal Cunt (sorry!) guys was sleeping nearby and they didn’t want to wake him. We’re pretty sure INM’s lo-fi, acoustic approach—generally speaking, all their songs feature a single acoustic guitar, some knee-slap percussion and whispered/growled unintelligible vocals—is all part of the joke, but we’ll buy into the origin story, if only because it makes the guys responsible for such Anal Cunt (sorry!) classics as “Recycling Is Gay” and “You’re Old (Fuck You)” sound touchingly concerned for the well-being of their bandmates.
Impaled Northern Moonforest played only a handful of live shows, and won’t play any more, because Seth Putnam, lead singer for both INM and AxCx (which, it turns out, is the polite way to type “Anal Cunt”—wish I’d known that two paragraphs ago), died last year of an apparent heart attack at the age of 43. They seem to have recorded only one record, variously referred to as an album or demo, that exists in very limited quantities (that’s the cover above—yes, all their artwork is as primitive as their music). Most of their songs are barely a minute long, although it sometimes takes longer than that just to say their titles: “Bloodlustfully Praising Satan’s Unholy Allmightyness in the Woods at Midnight,” “Summoning the Unholy Frozen Winterdemons to the Grimmest and Most Frostbitten Inverted Forest of Abazagorath,” and my personal favorite, “Grim and Frostbitten Gay Bar.”
Maybe the greatest thing about Impaled Northern Moonforest is that a whole fan-driven mythology of “acoustic black metal” has sprung up in their wake. There are discussion forums, Last.fm genre memes, and even a bunch of other acoustic black metal acts like Sodomized by Satan, Nyhetsvarsel and Severed Colon. For some folks, acoustic black metal is a joke that never gets old.
There are also a handful of fan-made INM videos, of which this is the best, in our not-so-humble opinions. Seth Putnam, your legacy lives on.
Links:
Anklepants
(Photo by Maren Michaelis)
Ever since Daft Punk strapped on their cyborg motorcycle helmets, it seems like every electronic artist from Deadmau5 to the Bloody Beetroots has felt the need to liven up their act with some kind of crazy mask or helmet or headdress thingie. But how many electronic artists can you name with an animatronic penis where their nose should be? As of today, you can name one: Anklepants.
The man behind the Anklepants mask is Dr Reecard Farché, aka Josh Head, whose day job is working in the special effects industry, designing latex models, prosthetics and animatronics. His credits include Where the Wild Things Are, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and one of my favorite weird movies of all time, The Host, a Korean monster movie that you should Netflix this instant if you haven’t already seen it. (Seriously, stick that bad boy in your Netflix queue. I’ll wait.) His skills in this area explain how creepily lifelike Anklepants’ wrinkled visage is, as well as how his penis-nose is able to waggle around seemingly with a mind of its own (watch the video below, you’ll see what I mean).
But enough about Anklepants’ prosthetic schnoz. How’s the music, you ask? Well, that’s pretty fucking out there, too. If you cruise over to his Soundcloud page, you’ll hear some bizarre spins on techno, dubstep and drum ‘n’ bass with titles like “I Took Candy From a Baby” and (deep breath) “InsideyourfacedubstepbeanstalktoheavenfortheAtheist.” Dude’s definitely not coasting on his visual effects skills.
Anklepants’ live show looks pretty fun, too. He uses a custom cordless microphone with all sorts of buttons and presets that distort his voice in various interesting ways, and he seems to enjoy getting out from behind his gear to run around the audience, even when that audience is a bit scattered and obviously really confused by what they’re seeing.
So here’s the video for “[speak you little facehead],” which features Anklepants and his similarly faced sidekick (who also apparently sometimes doubles as a pole dancer at his live shows) tripping balls after devouring a bunch of plastic toys that have been melted in a microwave. Actually, we’re not really sure what’s going on in this video, but we’ve definitely never seen anything like it. Which coming from us is saying something.
Links:
- Anklepants on MySpace
- Anklepants on Facebook
- Reecard Farché’s Tumblr
- Anklepants/Reecard Farché on Bandcamp
- Anklepants on Soundcloud
- Qwerty Records official site (Anklepants’ label)
- Squat Club on Bandcamp (Josh Head’s prog-rock project)
