Category Archives: Uncategorized
Let’s take this blog up a notch, shall we?
Happy 2012, weirdlings! Jake and I have decided it’s high time we shake things up here TWBITW, so expect some changes and surprises in the months ahead, including:
- More posts. Not just a new band every few days, but updates on bands we’ve already posted about. You want up-to-the-minute news on Insane Clown Posse, don’t you? Well, even if you don’t, you’re gonna get it.
- “Weirdify” playlists. Every two weeks or so, we’ll share a new Spotify playlist with some of our latest favorite weird nuggets from bands on the Weird 100 and beyond. It’ll be just like your regular TWBITW experience, only with way less of that annoying “reading” stuff.
- Weird Wednesdays. Starting this week, we’ll be adding a new band to the Weird A-Z List every Wednesday, instead of our previous system of adding bands whenever the hell we felt like it. Which was admittedly more our style, but “Weird Wednesdays” just sounds cool, so we’re running with it.
- Weird Band TV. Okay, this one is still more in the R&D phase. But sometime in 2012, we will begin shooting and posting our own videos, featuring whichever of the Weird 100 artists are desperate enough for publicity to agree to let Jake and me interview them. It’s gonna be just like this site, minus the cute host chick, hipster attitude and quality camera work.
And there’s more stuff in the works, but we can’t tell you or it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it?
One more thing: After much debate and gnashing of teeth and other body parts, we decided to do away with the polls on what was formerly known as the Submit/Vote page and is now just the Submit a Band page. So to those of you who really liked clicking on those little voting buttons, our apologies. You can still suggest bands and we’ll totally consider them…and by “totally,” we of course mean, “probably, if the mood strikes us.”
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more weirdness than you can shake one of these at.
The Superions
As we gear up for another round of dysfunctional holiday get-togethers with our respective fam-damnlies, Jake and I would like to take a moment to reflect back with gratitude on all that 2011 brought us here at TWBITW. This was the year in which we had our highest traffic day ever; in which our average monthly traffic nearly doubled; in which we discovered Here Come the Mummies and witch house; in which we got mentioned by The Onion (OK, it was really just the Denver/Boulder AV Club, but close enough); and in which we got to see Peelander-Z in the costumed, squid-kicking flesh. Oh, and somehow I managed to find time to get married. (Jake is still saving himself for the right girl and/or vaginally equipped life form.) It was a pretty great year.
Most importantly, we got a shit-ton of band suggestions, comments, emails, Facebook likes and ego-stroking gestures of goodwill from you, our readers. So thanks for all that. You are the rum in our eggnog.
We’re going to enjoy a little down time for the remainder of 2011, but we’ll be back in 2012, bright-tailed, bushy-eyed and ready to unleash more weirdness upon the world. And we’ll be making some changes to expand the scope (and hopefully the readership) of this site. So stay tuned, ’cause it’s about to go down like Foxy Brown. Or something like that.
In the meantime, we’ll leave you with our favorite Christmas-themed weird band: The Superions. They surfaced last year with an album called Destination…Christmas! that basically sounds like an even campier version of the B-52′s…which makes sense, given that the head Superion is the B-52′s’ shouter-in-chief, Fred Schneider. Apparently they also do a few non-holiday-related songs, too, but we prefer to think of them as Schneider’s secret gay plot to forever associate Christmas with hunky shirtless dudes dancing with fruitcakes. Enjoy your holidays!
P.S. They also have a Fruitcake app, which you can purchase for 99 cents here. We haven’t tried it yet, but we’re guessing it does not contain actual fruitcake recipes.
Links:
- The Superions on MySpace
- The Superions on Facebook
- What the Fruitcake (official Fruitcake app site)
Klaus Nomi
Today’s weird band…or rather, weird artiste…was suggested by a reader named Aaron, who notes that New Wave opera singer Klaus Nomi was “most defiantly a awesome weird guy.” True dat, Aaron! Even if you meant to say “definitely,” there was also something defiantly weird about Mr. Nomi, too.
Klaus Nomi was an opera-obsessed gay kid from Bavaria, which is sort of the German equivalent of being from Alabama. He moved to Berlin as a teenager to attend a music conservatory and work at the Deutsche Oper where, legend has it, he gave impromptu concerts for his fellow ushers while they were sweeping up after the shows. But he didn’t really fit in with either the Berlin opera community or the gay nightclub scene (which wasn’t used to drag queens singing arias), so like many of the world’s great freaks, he finally washed up in New York City. The year was 1972.
By 1978, Nomi was finally making a name for himself in the East Village art scene, performing arias in a melodramatic counter-tenor and even more melodramatic costumes, engulfed in smoke bombs and sci-fi sound effects. His reputation eventually caught the ear of David Bowie, who invited Nomi and one of his backup singers, Joey Arias, to perform with him on Saturday Night Live in 1979. You can watch clips of the performances over on this site, and marvel at how much tamer pop music is these days (yes, even you, Lady Gaga).
The SNL appearance changed Nomi’s life. Not only did he borrow the oversized plastic tuxedo look Bowie sported and make it his signature outfit, he also scored a record deal and released two albums, Klaus Nomi (1981) and Simple Man (1982), before his AIDS-related death in 1983. He was 44.
Nomi’s music was a bizarre and totally unique mix of original pop tunes done in a campy, New Wave style, avant-garde covers of oldies like Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” and operatic pieces–his set closer was an aria from the 19th century French opera Samson and Delilah. You could call him a trail-blazer, but really, no one’s quite followed the trail he blazed. Everyone from Morrissey to Jean Paul Gaultier has acknowledged him as an influence, but really, there just ain’t that many pop/New Wave opera singers in the world. Klaus Nomi was probably a one-time deal.
Here’s a clip of him performing his most famous tune, “Nomi Song,” on French TV. Purists might prefer the original “Nomi Song” video, but the picture and sound quality are a little better on this version.
Links:
- Klaus Nomi ZABAKDAZ (official site for posthumous Nomi album, Za Bakdaz)
- Klaus Nomi on MySpace (unofficial)
- The Nomi Song (official site for Klaus Nomi documentary, released in 2004)
- The Klaus Nomi Tribute Page (fan site)
- Klaus Nomi Keys of Life (fan site)
- A weird little Klaus Nomi Flash animation tribute site
Trippple Nippples
Thank God for Japan. If it wasn’t for that crazy little island nation, this blog would not be half as much fun.
The latest bit of freakery from the Land of the Rising Sun: Trippple Nippples, a nutso female duo trio who make spazzy, hyper-caffeinated electro-pop and wear costumes that make Lady Gaga seem kinda dull and unimaginative. Supposedly, their live shows include cow costumes that squirt Bailey’s from the teats. Definitely, they include helmets made from rice noodles and, judging from this video, lots of balloons and black latex body paint.
Anyway, here’s the new video for the Trippp’s latest track, “LSD,” which is about the joys of, well, LSD. And screaming till your eyes bleed. Although if you watch this video enough times, you may be able to achieve eye-bleeding results without the aid of either screaming or LSD.
Links:
Brokencyde
Today’s weird band was brought to our attention by Richard, the man behind Army of Gay Unicorns. Dude knows his weird shit, and by his account, this band Brokencyde is not only bomb-ass weird, they are, in his words, “the worst thing I have ever heard.”
A quick search around the Interwebs for all things Brokencyde reveals that Richard is not alone in his low opinion of these four neon-shirted wiggers from Albuquerque, a city that, thanks to Breaking Bad, we mostly associate with crystal meth and now, thanks to Brokencyde, we will also associate with douchey white kids drinking 40 ounces outside their parents’ McMansions. To hear the music journos tell it, Brokencyde is the worst band on the planet. Which is bullshit, of course. Everybody knows that title still belongs to Nickelback. But yeah, Brokencyde are pretty bad.
Brokencyde’s music, if you could call it that, is basically a combination of shitty club hip-hop and screamo, a mutant strain of emo that’s really, really pissed at you for thinking emo sucks. Apparently Brokencyde’s stuff is called “crunkcore,” although we’re proposing right here that it be dubbed “douchecore” instead. It’s party music, sort of, but only for those parties that are shot through with social anxiety, desperation and the threat of meth-and-alcohol-fueled violence–the kind of parties where the next day, everyone talks about who got his stomach pumped and who got his jaw broken and which girls may or may not have gotten date raped after passing out in the bath tub. It’s party music for people who are, deep down, not really in the mood to party. They’re more in the mood to break shit, up to and including themselves.
Still, it must be said that Brokencyde’s greatest artistic achievement to date, the video to their early hit “Freaxxx,” is such a perfect storm of terrible that there’s actually something kind of genius about it. With its sad little cluster of girls, trying to look hot while the “screamo” guys shriek into their faces, the random dude in the pig suit, the suburban soccer mom-ish choice of rides (Range Rovers and Jaguars? really?)…no wonder someone smarter than me called it “a near-perfect snapshot of everything that’s shit about this point in the culture.”
By the way, if anyone cares, Brokencyde recently released their third (!) album, the aptly titled Guilty Pleasure. Would you be surprised if I told you it’s available exclusively at Hot Topic?
[Update: To give credit where credit is due, it should be noted that while we came up with the term "douchecore" totally on our own, these guys actually thought it up first. They even specifically applied it to Brokencyde. We might have been guilty of unconscious plagiarism on this one.]
Links:
Vocal Trash
What do you get when you cross Stomp, Rockapella, and the kind of highly enthusiastic but somewhat amateurish cover bands you see at B-list state fairs in places like Iowa and Delaware? You get Vocal Trash, a band that combines a cappella, found-object percussion, tap dancing, trumpet solos and, oh, let’s just throw a little break-dancing in there, shall we? I mean, why the hell not?
Vocal Trash was started about 10 years by a guy from West Texas named Steve Linder, who judging from the amount of eyeliner he wears probably did not fit in with the other kids in the Lone Star State. The group was originally pretty much just a cross between show choir and banging on trash cans–”Glee with a kick!” as the press materials proclaim. There was something goofy and white-trash but undeniably awesome about them, especially when they unleashed their junkyard swag on the confused but obviously entranced masses on the state fair circuit:
More recently, the band has slicked up its stage show by adding more instruments, choreographed dance moves and a very Stomp-like stage set–all of which can seen in this somewhat depressing promotional video. Apparently they do lots of corporate events and theme parks and such these days, which explains the snazzier production values and the inclusion of the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” in their set list.
And hey, we get it–they’ve been doing this for 10 years, and at a certain point, if the quirky junkyard show band shtick isn’t landing you those major corporate gigs, you lose the fat dude with the biker mustache and bring in the break-dancers. But we still shed a tear for the demise of the rag-tag group in this no-budget video, which looks like it was shot in haste before they were chased off by the scrapyard Rottweilers:
Links:
- Vocal Trash official site
- Vocal Trash’s other official site
- Vocal Trash on Facebook
- Vocal Trash on MySpace
- Vocal Trash’s YouTube channel
Rammstein
Like a lot of Americans, I never heard of Rammstein until they were all over the news as one of the favorite bands of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, a.k.a. the kids who shot up Columbine High School in 1999. A yearbook photo even surfaced of Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt. Apparently, this German industrial band was the Embodiment of Pure Evil and had somehow influenced (along with Marilyn Manson and KMFDM) these impressionable Colorado kids to join the “Trenchcoat Mafia” and go on one of the most horrific shooting sprees in U.S. history. At least that was what the hyperbolic, ham-brained, frothing-at-the-mouth morons who pass for mainstream media in this country would have had you believe. (Sorry, Rest of the World. We’re not all as idiotic as Fox News, I swear.)
Since then, I’ve come to learn that while yes, Rammstein can be a little dark, they aren’t in the habit of encouraging their fans to go on shooting rampages. They’re pretty much just your average metal/industrial band, except they sing everything in German–which, to a certain conservative strain of Middle America, automatically makes everything they do terrifying. Not because they’re German, per se–in Middle America, all foreign languages are terrifying. We Americans aren’t so good with the whole foreign language thing. It’s why when we travel abroad, we yell at your waiters in slow, over-enunciated English.
I’ve also come to learn that, actually, there’s nothing “average” about Rammstein’s version of brutal, Teutonic hard rock. Their music and their stage shows tend to be bigger, louder and more bombastic than pretty much all of their peers, in Germany (where the term “Neue Deutsche Härte”–”New German Hardness”–was coined to describe bands like Rammstein and Oomph!) and elsewhere. The word “Wagnerian” gets used to describe them a lot. Their shows feature over-the-top props like giant, foam-shooting penises and pyro–lots of pyro. Lead singer Till Lindemann is actually a certified pyrotechnician, which must come in handy when the band does stuff like this.
But the coolest thing about Rammstein–and the thing that really earns them an entry here on TWBITW–is that they’re funny. This sometimes seems to get lost in translation, for obvious reasons–but then again, can anyone really watch their “Amerika” video and not get the joke? Judging from the YouTube comments, apparently the answer is “yes.” Oh, my fellow Americans. Y’all need to lighten up.
Fortunately, for the irony-challenged among us, Rammstein just released a new video to promote Made In Germany 1995-2011, their first greatest-hits album. (Yes, they have hits. They’ve sold over 15 million records worldwide, in fact. So color us clueless for having never heard of them prior to Columbine.) It’s for a new song called “Mein Land,” it was directed by Jonas Åkerlund (whose other credits include Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” and the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up”) and it’s awesome. It’s a German industrial beach party! (Stay with it till the 3:33 mark; that’s when it takes a real turn for the, uh, Härte.)
Links:
- Rammstein official site
- Rammstein on MySpace
- Rammstein on YouTube
- Herzeleid.com (fan site)
- RammsteinNicCage.com (fan site)
- Affenknecht (fan site)
The Ass Orbiters
Listen, Andy and I are always grateful that anyone bothers to read our crappy little blog, but damn. Sometimes we don’t know about you people.
The votes are in on the latest band from our Submit & Vote page, and despite the fact that their most distinguishing qualities are wearing asshats (not a figure of speech–see photo above) and making fun of the handicapped, the Ass Orbiters have been declared weird by our dubious readership. So, congratulations, Ass Orbiters! You may be tacky and tasteless, but around here, that’s apparently how we like it.
What else can we tell you about this New York band? We’ll let head Orbiter Gary Perkinson sum it up: “We’ve basically made a career out of throwing whatever kind of idiotic crap we can come up against the wall and seeing what sticks. What more could an audience ask for than 45 minutes of cheap laughs and six-minute prog/reggae/waltz songs about diarrhea and putting evangelical Christian ministers in the gas chamber?”
Seriously, what more could you ask for? Mercy, perhaps? You won’t be getting any of that from the Ass Orbiters, buddy. You’re gonna get Ween-like genre-hopping songs with titles like “Tree Rapist” and “I Wanna Pee on That” and you’re gonna like it.
So without further ado, allow us to present what may well be the Ass Orbiters’ defining moment: a little countrified ditty called “Cripples and Drunks at the Roller Derby.” You’re welcome.
Links:
- The Ass Orbiters on Facebook
- Gary’s SoundCloud page (featuring more Ass Orbiter classics)
- The Ass Orbiters on ReverbNation
Sunn O)))
Today’s weird band was suggested by a reader named Jordan. Sup, Jordan? Glad you’re digging the site.
The band is called Sunn O))) (that’s a capital letter O, not a zero, in case you were wondering) and they’re a drone metal band made up of two dudes from Seattle, Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, plus various guest vocalists and other collaborators. What is drone metal, you ask? Well, imagine heavy metal stripped off all beats and slowed down until it sounds like the world’s slowest demon army coming to either bludgeon you into paste or slowly bore you to death. It’s not for everyone, is what we’re saying. But Sunn O)))’s version has its pluses.
For one thing, there’s the band live act, which involves volume and smoke machines cranked up to 11 and band members lurking about the stage in long black robes like a bunch of malevolent metal druids. And since playing drone metal doesn’t really require much in the way of technical shredding, there’s also a lot of guitars-and-fists-up pose-striking. Sometimes, it looks like they’re barely playing their guitars at all–they just hit one chord and then stand there looking all “Kneel before your Lord and Master” while those enormous Marshall stacks do all the work. There’s something very Spinal Tap about it, even though the music is so abstract it’s almost not even music anymore–it’s just a bunch of bowel-loosening tones.
In general, Sunn O))) is not a band for people with short attention spans. Music that moves this slowly takes awhile to get where it’s going–a lot of Sunn O))) tracks are over 20 minutes long. A lot of fans and critics seemed to think their last album, Monoliths and Dimensions, was downright accessible by Sunn O))) standards–and the shortest track on that set is nine minutes long and called “Big Church (Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért).” So you won’t be hearing them at the mall anytime soon.
Sunn O))) live shows are by all accounts pretty bizarre affairs, but they don’t render real well in video form–YouTube can’t capture the sheer visceral punch of all that noise, and your average FlipCam is screwed when the smoke machines get cranking. So instead, we’ll leave you with a track called “My Wall,” which features some spoken-word ranting from professional weirdo/occultist Julian Cope. Apparently that’s druidic poetry he’s reciting. Again, very Spinal Tap. Stonehenge!
(P.S. Random bonus factoid about Sun O))): They’ve performed with Madonna. No, we’re not making this up.)
Links:
- Sunn O))) on MySpace
- Sunn O))) on Southern Lord Records (label website)
- Sunn O)))/Boris – “Altar” (official site for collaborative album with Japanese metal band)
- Ideologic (Stephen O’Malley official site)
The Misfits
When I want to get into the Halloween spirit, my third favorite thing to do (after answering the door naked and offering Jager shots to the neighborhood kids) is crank up The Misfits. Seriously, is any band more synonymous with Halloween? I think not.
There are, of course, two versions of The Misfits: the original, Glenn Danzig one, and the latter-day, Jerry Only one, also widely known among fans as “the bullshit version.” I actually dig them both for totally different reasons. Danzig’s Misfits were fun, kooky and occasionally scary in a sort of Ramones-meets-Tales From the Crypt way; Only’s Misfits are fun, kooky and occasionally hilarious in a Dead Milkmen-meets-Killer Clowns From Outer Space way. See the difference?
Anyway, I figured this Halloween, it’d be good to honor the original horror punks with a spot on our ever-growing Weird List. Here’s a video from the Jerry Only era. Had they become total parodies of themselves by this point? Of course, but that’s sort of the point.
P.S. Not that the world really needs a new Misfits album, but we got one this month anyway. It’s called The Devil’s Rain and you can hear a track, “Land of the Dead,” by going to their website and clicking the Audio On/Off button. Yes, that’s Jerry doing vocals now. At this point, he can do whatever the hell he wants, but…man. Suddenly, for all the wrong reasons, they’ve gotten kinda scary again.
Links:
- The Misfits official site
- Misfits Records official site (record label started by Jerry Only in 2002)
- The Misfits on MySpace
- MisfitsCentral.com (fan site)
