Category Archives: Uncategorized
Loutallica (Lou Reed & Metallica)
We’re not usually big bandwagon-jumpers around here. Show us a bandwagon and we tend to run the other way as fast our wobbly legs can carry us. But with this whole “Loutallica” thing, we cannot sit idly by while the rest of Ye Olde Blogosphere whips up a good-old fashioned shitstorm over how unbelievably, monumentally terrible it is. We gotta get on in there and start freaking the fuck out with the rest of them.
So in case you weren’t sure: Yes, we share the near-universal opinion that Lou Reed and Metallica’s much hyped Lulu–in addition to being quite possibly the weirdest album of the year–is a trainwreck of epic, biblical proportions. If this album was a movie, it would be Howard the Duck. If it was a car, it would a lime-green Pinto with vinyl seats. If it was a rapper, it would be Vanilla Ice, only if he had never done “Ice Ice Baby.” If it was a football team, it would be the 2008 Detroit Lions. If it was something you could buy out of a vending machine, it would be New Coke. No wait…it would be Diet New Coke. Did they even make Diet New Coke? If they did, it would have sucked only slightly more than Lulu.
To be fair, we should have seen this coming. These are the guys that gave us St. Anger and Metal Machine Music, after all. Lou Reed has a penchant for pretentious noise that dates all the way back to his Velvet Underground days–just try to listen to all nine minutes of “Murder Mystery” and feel anything other than proud of yourself for slogging all the way through it. And Metallica’s issues, both musical and emotional, have been well-documented. Put them together, and a perfect storm of bombastitude was probably the inevitable result.
But still…it could have been so sweet. “Sweet Jane” + “Enter Sandman”? Sign us up. But Reed and Hetfield and co. have pretty clearly lost all interest in making those kinds of records at this point in their respective careers…or they’ve forgotten how to. Either way, this whole project was a moonshot that came up well short.
The only good thing that’s come out of Lulu? An awesome new “I Am the Table” internet meme. People are getting more creative online with that shit than Lou and ‘Tallica got with their entire album. (If you have no idea what “I Am the Table” means…well, count yourself lucky, or listen to the track below if you want in on the joke.)
Anyway…if you’re one of the five people who still haven’t heard this shit, feast your ears. And if you’re one of the zero people who want to hear the whole thing (including a 19-minute track called “Junior Dad”…you’ve been warned), it’s all streaming over on the Loutallica site.
Links:
- Lou Reed & Metallica official site
- Metallica official site
- Lou Reed official site
- Lou Reed/Metallica YouTube channel
- Chuck Klosterman on Lulu (best thing we’ve read on the subject)
The KLF
(Photo originally appeared in Details magazine, 1991; article available here)
Today’s band was suggested by a reader from Belgium (worldwide, baby!) named Steve V., and it may surprise some of our American readers. Here in the States, The KLF are mainly remembered (if they ‘re remembered at all), as just another of that pack of seemingly indistinguishable bands who cashed in on that weird moment around 1990 or so when house music was actually getting played on the radio. But trust us, these guys were not in the same league as MARRS and C+C Music Factory. They may as well not even have come from the same planet.
The KLF originally started as a British hip-hop group called the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, then morphed briefly into a deliberately lame proto-house group called The Timelords, whose one and only single, “Doctorin’ the Tardis,” was a piss-take of pop hits that, perhaps inevitably, itself became a massive pop hit. A mash-up of the Doctor Who theme with Sweet’s “Blockbuster!” and Gary Glitter’s “Rock & Roll Part Two,” “Doctorin’ the Tardis” went to No. 1 in the UK in 1988 and reportedly sold over one million copies. Its success inspired the Timelords/KLF duo, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, to write a book called The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), which dispensed such we’re-kidding-but-not-really advice as “if in a band, quit” and “watch Top of the Pops religiously.” (The book is out of print but you can read most of it online here–or shell out $89 to a greedy Amazon reseller here.)
Drummond and Cauty probably could’ve scored a spot here on TWBITW as The Timelords solely on the basis of “Doctorin’ the Tardis” (and its video, which is one of the most hilariously amateurish artifacts of ’80s pop music), but they didn’t stop there. Instead, they reinvented themselves yet again as The KLF, an acid house group that specialized in what Drummond (aka King Boy D) called “pure dance music, without any reference points.” The KLF went on to become one of the most successful dance acts of the era, releasing a string of increasingly bizarre Top 10 hits in 1990 and 1991 that combined elements of acid house, rock, pop, hip-hop, gospel, ambient electronica and even country. (Their last single, “Justified and Ancient (Stand by the JAMs),” featured guest vocals by Tammy Wynette.) They called it, a bit cheekily, “stadium house”–and they were indeed successful enough with it to fill their fair share of stadiums.
It seemed The KLF could do no wrong. Until Drummond and Cauty got bored with their success and, in one spectacular public gesture, chucked it all.
In February of 1992, The KLF were scheduled to perform at the BRIT Awards, England’s answer to the Grammys. Instead of their usual rap/rave stage show, Drummond and Cauty brought in a punk/grindcore band called Extreme Noise Terror to play a thrashed-out version of the KLF hit “3 a.m. Eternal,” which climaxed with Drummond, grinning and supporting himself on a crutch, breaking out a machine gun and firing blanks over the heads of the stunned audience. As the band left the stage, an announcer declared, “The KLF have left the music business.” Later that night, The KLF left a dead sheep at a BRIT Awards after-party with a sign hung around its neck reading, “I died for you–bon appetit.”
Not content to stop there, Drummond and Cauty took the almost unheard-of step of deleting their entire back catalog. All albums and singles by The KLF, The Timelords and the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu remain out of print in the U.K.–although last we checked, The KLF’s final album, The White Room, is still available in the U.S., presumably because the duo’s contract with their American label, Arista, didn’t allow for catalog deletion. (But Arista’s parent company, Sony, just folded Arista into RCA Records, so it will be interesting to see if White Room stays in print.)
But wait! Drummond and Cauty took it a step further still. Still flush with cash from their days as pop hitmakers, they decided to take one million pounds in cash, nail it to a picture frame, then shop it around to various art galleries under the title Nailed to the Wall. Then, when no gallery would agree to show the work, they took their million quid to a remote Scottish island and burned it–all of it, in £50 notes–in a fireplace, filming the whole thing. The film they made about the whole project–including the creation of the K Foundation, a satirical arts foundation that also awarded £40,000 to the “worst artist of the year”–is called Watch The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid and can be viewed in its entirety on Google Video. It’s a pretty fascinating document. (The burning starts at around the 13:45 mark.)
We could go on about these guys: How they came out of retirement in 1997 in old-man makeup and motorized wheelchairs, giving a single performance of a remixed version of one of their old songs titled “Fuck the Millennium.” How they invited a bunch of journalists out to the island of Jura (the same island where they later burned their million quid) and made them all dress in ceremonial robes so they could film an elaborate ritual centered around a burning wicker man and called the whole thing The Rites of Mu. How they once traveled to Sweden hoping to persuade ABBA to let them keep an uncleared sample on their debut album, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?). (ABBA refused to meet with them and insisted that the album be withdrawn from sale–Drummond and Cauty, ever the pyros, burned a bunch of copies of that record, too.)
But really, we think nothing sums up how completely mental these guys were than this video for “America: What Time Is Love?” It’s got everything: Vikings! Rappers! Stadium house beats! Shredding guitars! The lead singer from Deep Purple! Yes, there really was a time in pop music history when this song could go Top 10 in eight countries.
Links:
- The KLF WebRing
- Library of Mu (archive of KLF-related articles and documents)*
- The KLF on MySpace (unofficial site)
- The Mu-Museum (fan site)
- Penkiln Burn (Bill Drummond-related arts site)
- The17 (Bill Drummond current musical project)
- Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid (full film)
*Note: The Library of Mu domain name expired the day we published this. It’s a conspiracy! Which would sort of make sense, because The KLF loved conspiracies. They were big fans of The Illuminatus Trilogy.
Threebrain
Back in 2003, I had one of those horrible, soul-crushing jobs where you sit at a desk all day and chip away at the same boring, tedious, a-monkey-could-do-this-shit tasks knowing that your reward, upon completion of said tasks, will be another giant, teetering stack of the exact same boring, tedious, a-monkey-could-do-this-shit tasks. It was assembly line work, basically, except that instead of a bad back and exposure to carcinogens, I got a fat ass and carpal tunnel syndrome. At least my cubicle had a window. With a view of a Chevron station, but still.
In between monkey tasks–and since I’m not a monkey, there grew to be a great deal of time between monkey tasks–I whiled away the hours in all sorts of stupid ways. This was before Facebook and YouTube, remember, so even with access to the Interweb, my cubicle-bound office-mates and I had to make due with some pretty primitive entertainment options. We created lots of fake Friendster accounts. This one girl Sarah got me totally hooked on a ridiculous videogame called Snood. We anticipated the arrival of Friday happy hour with lots of rockin’ out to “Peanut Butter Jelly Time.” It was a simpler, more innocent era.
Somewhere, in the midst of all this, someone turned me onto this amazing, totally stupid little Flash animation featuring a squirrel and a song in which a guy with a chipmunk voice basically just screamed “Weeeee!” a lot. In my somewhat dehumanized state, I thought this was pretty much the greatest thing I had ever seen. That squirrel and that “Weeeee!” song helped me through some dark days.
Eventually, I got another, less soul-crushing job and I put those dark days behind me. Or so I thought.
A few days ago, a reader named Steve R. wrote in and suggested we feature a band called Threebrain. And damn if it isn’t the same crazy bastards who did that “Weeeee!” song. Turns out they did a whole crap-ton of cheesy little animation videos in the pre-YouTube early ’00s and most of them are still viewable on this site. Ain’t the web a wonderful place? Nostalgia is but a mouse-click away.
So thanks, Steve, for bringing back a fond memory I had inadvertently buried in my mad dash to mind-erase most of my miserable 2003 existence. Turns out it wasn’t so bad after all. I even miss Friendster, kind of. At least they didn’t try to data-mine our entire browser history like those fuckers at Facebook.
I wish I could tell you more about Threebrain, but honestly, the amount of info out there is surprisingly limited, considering that back in 2003, that “Weeeeee!” video was more ubiquitous than the dancing hamsters. Allegedly it was the work of a duo from Morristown, New Jersey. They put out two albums, Weeeeee! – Albert Christmas Squirrel and Fetus Trackstar, in 2001 and 2003, respectively. They’re both still available on iTunes, actually. The music is sort of like if the Violent Femmes tried to make a children’s album–but a children’s album with song titles like “Hot Dogs Are Shit” and “Buttbadger 123.” And if the only thing they had to record their work on was a crappy laptop mic. And they sped up their vocals to make themselves sound like chipmunks. Yeah, it’s kinda like that.
More recently, Threebrain appears to be the work of just one guy: this guy, in fact. That video was uploaded just three weeks ago and yes, it really is just seven minutes of that guy noodling around on his banjo and singing in weird voices. The rest of his YouTube channel has other videos that are more in the “Weeeee!” tradition of lo-fi animation accompanied by silly songs, as well as a bunch of videos of something called Toilet of Wisdom, which appears to be some kind of three-man comedy show. He promises on YouTube, and also on Threebrain’s (former?) online home, GonadsandStrife.com (“where funny lives!”), to make “a new cartoon every damn day,” but as far as I could tell, he’s only made about three in last year or so. But hey, that’s cool–we promise ourselves to update this site two or three times a week, and you can see how that’s working out. Sometimes great art takes time–and so do 15-second slide whistle cartoons.
So hopefully Threebrain will get his mojo back soon and spawn another Internet viral sensation. Or maybe the days of primitive Flash animation videos are past and we’ve all moved on to cat videos with comedic voiceover dialogue. Either way, here’s a blast from the past, starring Albert Christmas Squirrel. Trust me, you’re totally gonna watch it and be all like, “Weeeee!”
Links:
- Threebrain official site (currently just a static page promising “new site coming soon”)
- Gonads and Strife! (onetime online home of Threebrain; appears to have been inactive since April 2010)
- Toilet of Wisdom (a collection of quotes from bathroom walls; may or may not be related to Threebrain-affiliated comedy troupe of the same name)
- Threebrain on MySpace
- Threebrain’s YouTube channel
- Threebrain on Facebook
- Threebrain at Albino Blacksheep (classic Flash videos)
- Threebrain on Newgrounds (more recent videos)
Paska
Today’s band was suggested to us by a reader named Alex. Big ups to him, as the kids like to say, because the one-man rock ‘n’ roll wrecking crew known as Paska (Finnish for “shit”) is as weird as they come. It’s like if someone shoved Bobby McFerrin so far up G.G. Allin’s ass, he started spouting punk-rock a cappella covers of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Paska is one Ari Peltonen, and his entire shtick is that he performs and records, very, very badly, with just his voice–no instruments, no overdubs, just one clearly unhinged individual sing-screaming highly condensed, barely intelligible versions of songs like “Ace of Spades” and “Love Me Tender”, interspersed with the occasional really bad mouth guitar solo, random drum hits and whatever other noises he can muster in between sloppy gasps for more oxygen. Oh, and he does perform a few originals, too, like “Pain in the Ass,” “Sex Is Shit,” and my personal favorite, “I Fucked Myself and Fell in Love.” Been there, my Finnish brother!
Now I know what you’re thinking: “Jake, this sounds like what me and my friends do when we’re driving home from $2 pitcher night and everyone in the car is too drunk to work the CD changer.” But here’s the difference, my friend: No one would so much as buy you another $2 pitcher to see you and your friends drunkenly butcher the punk and pop classics of yore. Whereas this Peltonen dude has been doing his Paska shtick, and getting paid for it, since the 80s. He’s played major festivals. He’s toured the U.S. He’s released an album (2005′s Women Are From Venus, Men From Anus), an EP and various singles and 7″s. In Finland, he’s either sort of a national hero or public enemy No. 1, or maybe both. At the very least, he has his own radio show.
I think my favorite part of the whole Paska story is that in the early 90′s, Paska “broke up” and Peltonen began staging concerts as various “ex-Paska” members: the egomaniac lead singer was Jeesus, the cheesy organist was Johnny Blue, the disgruntled bass player was Jorma (Finnish for “dick”). Of course, all of these Paska “solo projects” also just consisted of Ari Peltonen jumping around by himself and screaming into a microphone, but that’s the genius of the whole thing, don’t you think?
Alex sent us over a crap-ton of YouTube links to Paska’s hijinks, and it’s hard to pick just one as our favorite. So fuck it, we’ll embed a few. He’s just that awesome.
First off, you gotta start by just appreciating the man’s raw performance skills, or lack thereof–and the fact that yes, he regularly does this stuff in front of attentive, seemingly appreciative audiences. So here’s Paska um, interpreting “Stairway to Heaven”, live and in concert:
Still with us? OK, now here’s my personal favorite: some wiseass edited Paska’s version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” over bits from the original Queen video. I like to think Freddie Mercury would have loved this, but I know he probably sheds a golden tear in rock star heaven every time it’s viewed:
And finally, for a good long stew in the sauna of Paska’s madness, see if you can make it through a mere 8 minutes (yes, this is only half of it) of his epic version of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”:
You didn’t actually listen to the whole thing, did you? Yeah, us neither. Just knowing it exists is the whole punchline, really.
Links:
- A Bald Finnish Maniac Named Paska (seemingly the only decent article ever written in English about this guy)
- Paskalista on Radio Helsinki (official site for Peltonen’s radio show–in Finnish)
- Bad Vugum (Paska’s first Finnish label)
- Riemu (the label that put out Women Are From Venus, Men From Anus)
Social Climbers
I gotta be honest on this one, folks: I’m not sure democracy really worked this time. You people voted this band onto the Weird List from our Submit & Vote page, fair and square, but…I dunno. I’m just not really feeling Social Climbers.
Part of the problem could be just a lack of hard evidence. According to the label that’s reissuing their one and only album, Social Climbers were a “no-wave/proto-punk” band from New York who were odd even compared to other bands at the time like Suicide and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. They supposedly did things like stage entire concerts with cardboard cutouts of themselves and piped-in music. But this was back in 1980, before videocameras were everywhere, so no record of those shows exist. All we have, in fact, is the music: an album’s worth of stuff like the “Domestic” track below, which is a little odd in a Talking Heads-meets-DEVO sort of way, but nothing especially mind-blowing.
We will say this for them, though: Mark Bingham, the main driving force behind Social Climbers, sounds like our kind of dude. An Indiana native who was apparently always more into jazz and avant-garde music (and played with guys like Glenn Branca and John Scofield), these days he runs a recording studio in New Orleans called Piety Street and looks back somewhat ruefully on his days hanging with the hip kids on the Lower East Side. “The downtown scene was really hostile to anyone who really knew how to play music,” he says of the whole NYC punk/no-wave scene at that time. “I couldn’t take the whole vibe of trust fund kids in black clothes getting smacked out and pretending to be punks.” (This from a great 2009 profile of the guy by Offbeat magazine.)
Bingham’s also done a bunch of solo records, some of which are available on CD Baby. Among them: an album of music cues for puppet shows and a bunch of instrumentals originally written to accompany poems by Ed Sanders of The Fugs. So hey, maybe he is a pretty weird guy, at that.
Anyhow, Social Climbers’ self-titled 1980 album was just reissued on Drag City Records. If you’re feeling it, you can preview more tracks and perhaps buy yourself a copy here.
Links:
- Social Climbers reissue on Drag City Records
- Social Climbers on Yoga Records
- Mark Bingham on CD Baby
The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble
It might not be obvious at first, but the distance between classical music and techno isn’t that great. Both are predominantly instrumental forms of music. Both layer sound in complex ways that go far beyond melody, or sometimes do away with melody altogether. Both think those avant-garde minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley are pretty dope. Techno and classical may play in different sandboxes, but they definitely share a shovel occasionally.
Still, the lengths Brandt Brauer Frick go to in order to combine the two genres seem a tad extreme. The first time we heard about these German cats, they were still pretty much building their minimal techno tracks the old-fashioned way: with lots of loops and programmed beats, albeit ones based mostly on acoustic sounds. But they were clearly interested in playing with people’s expectations of how such sounds are created; in the video for their track “Bop” (pictured above), they cloned themselves several times over to create an imaginary orchestra, playing the track’s hypnotically repetitive piano, percussion and even a well-timed rain stick with robotic precision.
But not content to stop there, BBF went ahead and created a ten-piece chamber orchestra called the (wait for it) Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble to recreate their tracks live, with no loops or programmed sounds at all. Even after watching two videos of the Ensemble in action, I still can’t decide if it’s a cool idea or not. I mean, on the one hand, it’s pretty damn impressive that these musicians–including a harpist, cellist, trombonist and whatever you call a tuba player (tubist?)–have the restraint, rhythmic sense and technical prowess required to produce the layered, percussive sounds of techno with mostly acoustic instruments (they sneak a Moog in there, but still). On the other hand, well, isn’t this what drum machines were invented for? I’m just not sure if it adds anything to my enjoyment of the music. It’s like watching a master sculptor carve an IKEA table.
But judge for yourself: Here’s a clip of the BBF Ensemble rehearsing a handful of tracks, including two (“Teufelsleiter” and “606 ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll”) from the first BBF album to feature the Ensemble, Mr. Machine, which is out on !K7 Records next month. What do you think…brilliant techno/classical fusion, or pointless technical exercise?
Hank3
It’s gotta suck being the musician kid of a famous musician. On the one hand, you want to carve out your own identity for yourself; on the other hand, how you sing and how you play and even how your write songs is embedded in your DNA. Dhani Harrison can’t help sounding like his dad George no matter how much Radiohead he listens to and how many members of Wu-Tang Clan he collaborates with. Harper Simon, son of Paul, toiled in obscurity on various unsuccessful musical projects until his late 30′s, when he finally said “Fuck it” and made a Simon & Garfunkel record. Heredity is destiny, or something like that.
So it’s kind of amazing that a guy like Hank3 exists. Hank3 is better known as Hank Williams III, grandson of the great Hank Williams and son of the not-so-great Hank Williams, Jr., that dude who sings the Monday Night Football theme. Any halfway sane offspring of that musical legacy would probably be on his third tour of duty with Celebrity Rehab by now. But happily, Hank3 is just the right kind of nuts to live it all down and do his own thing.
That thing, for years now, has been playing back-to-back sets every night of pickin’ and grinnin’ traditional, honky-tonk country, followed by a rip-your-face-off onslaught of punk, psychobilly and speed metal. Yes, Hank3 somehow manages to have it both ways. He honors the family legacy and extends an upraised middle finger to it, every night.
Because of the schizophrenic nature of his music, Hank3′s always been more than a little weird. But he really went off the deep end just recently with the release of 3 Bar Ranch Cattle Callin’, one of four different albums (well, technically three, because one was a double LP) he released on the same day earlier this month.
The other albums are all pretty much par for the Hank3 course. Ghost to a Ghost/Guttertown is a mix of trad country, the country/punk hybrid sound he calls “hellbilly,” and Hank’s swampy, spooky version of Cajun music. Attention Deficit Domination is a straight metal record, although it’s slower and sludgier than fans of Hank’s punk/metal band Assjack might expect.
Then there’s 3 Bar Ranch, which is a critter of a different color entirely. It’s an entire album’s worth of cattle auctioneers accompanied by speed metal. Hank3 calls it “cattlecore.” We call it…well, let’s just say the man famous for putting the “dick in Dixie” and the “cunt in country” really outdid himself this time.
Links:
- Hank3 official site
- Hank3 on Facebook
- Hank Williams III (Hank3) on MySpace
- Hank III/Assjack on MySpace
- Hank III YouTube channel
Haunted Garage
Have you ever wondered what the missing link is between the Misfits and GWAR? Us neither, but a reader named Jeremy just found it for us and posted it on our Facebook page (and hey, while we’re on the subject, go over to Facebook and “Like” us, will ya? I know, it’s annoying, but you never know…maybe if you do it, we’ll give you a pony). The band is called Haunted Garage and they appear to have taken the fine art of covering your audience in fake blood and real slime to heights that would probably leave Oderus Urungus clutching his codpiece in a fetal position. Okay, maybe not, but they were pretty fucking gross, is what I’m saying.
Haunted Garage were part of the L.A. underground rock scene from around 1985 until 1992, although they’ve done a handful of reunion shows in the years since. They only released one album as far as we can tell, a lost nugget from 1990 called Possession Park, although they also did the soundtracks for a lot of horror and sci-fi B-movies like Nightmare Sisters and The Dead Hate the Living!
The band was started by a B-movie actor and screenwriter named Michael Sonye. Among the credits on his IMDb page: Dorm of the Dead, Terrors From the Clit, Hollywood Chainsaw Bartenders and of course the immortal Troma classic Surf Nazis Must Die, which I’m pretty sure I watched in a bonghit haze back in high school and even then thought, “Wow, this sucks.” For Haunted Garage, Sonye made up an alter ego named Dukey Flyswatter who’s sort of a combination of Iggy Pop, Glenn Danzig and Dr. Frank N. Furter. The band apparently started out playing cover versions of songs from classic horror film soundtracks, but eventually started coming up with original tunes with titles like “Torture Dungeon” and “Brain in a Jar.” Their sound is usually described as horror punk, although Dukey also used the term “splatter punk,” which is a lot more evocative, don’t ya think?
Haunted Garage shows were highly theatrical and sometimes destructive affairs. A bio on the band’s MySpace page claims that their final show, at a long-gone Hollywood dive called the Coconut Teaser, ended with the crowd tearing down the sprinkler system and girls getting their tops ripped off. Up onstage, most of the blood, gore and mayhem was faked, but sometimes the band could cross over into full-on freakshow territory. Dukey, for example, is famous for attaching mousetraps to his face. (And if you clicked on that link, I apologize. That’s gonna be a tough image to shake, huh?)
There’s a cool “video profile” of Haunted Garage on YouTube, which also introduces such other memorable band members as their drag queen guitarist, Gaby Godhead, their rat-loving drummer, Stiff Slug, and the “gore-gore girls,” who provided the eye candy. But the video that we felt would give y’all the best taste of Haunted Garage in all their gory glory was the one below, featuring a sort of necrophiliac love song called “Dead and Gone.” Stay with it till around the 2:30 mark, when it really takes a turn for the freaky.
Links:
- Haunted Garage on MySpace
- Dukey Flyswatter on MySpace
- Gaby Godhead “My Awesome Crap” video (just because it is, indeed, awesome)
Army of Gay Unicorns
We thought it only fitting that on September 11 (or “America! Fuck Yeah! Day” as I like to call it), we flex our democratic muscles here once again at TWBITW and add a new band to the Weird List that was voted in by you, our freedom-loving readers. And you came out (pun totally intended) in favor of Army of Gay Unicorns. It’s a beautiful thing, really.
Now don’t let the name fool you: Army of Gay Unicorns sound neither particularly gay nor particularly unicorn-like, unless maybe we’re talking leather-daddy gay with a serious power-tool fetish. Songs like “Cranial Fragmentation Unit” and “Disintegration Codec” will take that unicorn horn and skull-fuck you with it till you’re begging for mercy. Then again, “Persistent Vegetative State” is actually kind of soothing and pleasant–though no so much in a gay unicorn way. More like in a morphine-drip, eating-through-a-straw way. Hence the title, I guess.
The dude behind all this is a reader of ours from the U.K. named Richard, who wrote in about a month ago with a link to his music and a question about whether we knew of any good GG Allin tribute bands (we don’t; any suggestions, kids?). To give you an idea of where Richard’s head is at, here’s an excerpt from one of his emails:
“i like to imagine that there’s an alternative universe where every year in vegas they have GG impersonator conventions, with GG’s of all shapes and sizes meeting in their thousands to share the love. and the poopoo. a midget GG dueting ‘bite it you scum’ on stage with a Japanese GG. it’s a beautiful vision that makes me feel sort of fuzzy inside.”
We honestly know almost nothing else about Richard and maybe that’s just as well. Anyone who gets warm fuzzy feelings from thoughts of GG Allin impersonators, you probably want to keep at a safe distance.
This is usually the part where we insert a YouTube video illustrating just how weird this particular band is. But AoGU has no YouTube videos, and that’s okay. A lot of the weirdest bands out there don’t. Their music is so weird that no visual accompaniment is really needed. They probably don’t play out much, either. Which is too bad, because “Army of Gay Unicorns” would look pretty sweet on a club marquee.
Anyhow, to hear more from Richard and Army of Gay Unicorns, head over to his Jamendo page. If you want to jump right into the deep end of his self-described “sonic dirty protest against a world gone numbingly stupid,” we suggest starting with a track called “The Aborted.” Play it really loud and we guarantee your neighbors will never speak to you again.
Links:
M△S▴C△RA (Mascara)
(Photo lifted from this site)
Today we really should be calling ourselves Weirdest Genre in the World, because today’s band, Mascara (or M△S▴C△RA, if you really insist), is just the tip of a giant iceberg of weirdness called witch house, or sometimes haunted house, or occasionally drag, or even (wait for it) “rape gaze.” Although the band that coined that last term has since disowned it, apparently deciding that no amount of hipper-than-thou ironic detachment can actually make rape seem like a viable metaphor for a new style of music.
So what the hell is “witch house”? It’s a new “micro-genre” (a really pretentious term we just stole from the Village Voice–thanks, guys!) that’s made up predominantly of bedroom electronic producers who combine slowed-down, sludgy beats with ghostly filtered vocals, lo-fi synths, ambient noise and distorted samples of other, often highly recognizable tunes. The results sound like a somewhat cobbled-together combination of chopped ‘n’ screwed hip-hop, goth-rock, darkwave, drone metal and that old Cure cassette you left on the dashboard too long in the late 80′s.
Many of the artists creating witch house protest that they’re not really part of any “scene” or creating music in any particular “genre.” And while it’s true that witch house artists are scattered all over the world, they for damn sure keep Interweb tabs on each other and style-bite with gusto. For example, the vast majority of witch housers (witchies?) mix numbers and symbols into their names or just pick names that are virtually impossible to Google, all apparently in an effort to maintain an air of mystery and underground cred: GL▲SS †33†H, ///▲▲▲\\\, GR†LLGR†LL, oOoOO (one of the godfathers of witch house, actually) and my personal favorite, ▲.
Wait, scratch that: My personal favorite is ▲)╪(▼, which according to their YouTube videos is pronounced “Whispering Sanctity.” Whispering Sanctity is probably some elaborate witch house piss-take, but when your entire scene has already become such a popular Internet meme that it’s inspired its own band name generator, the lines between self-parody and actual parody can get pretty blurry.
The most famous practitioners of witch house are a trio from Michigan called Salem (or S4LEM) who have already become rather legendary for seeming to be almost totally disinterested in being a band. Their somnolent performance at South by Southwest in 2010 is famous for being one of the few documented concerts at which jaded, skinny-jeaned hipsters, who usually passively consume whatever awful shit got at least a 7.8 in Pitchfork, actually booed the band off the stage. They mumble their way through interviews; their first EP was called Yes I Smoke Crack and at least one of the band’s members, John Holland, claims he really does, or did.
Maybe we should have dedicated this whole post to Salem and their uniquely burnout version of witch house, which really does sound like it was created by a bunch of druggy Midwestern kids who stumbled on this sound by accident because their only reference points were Chicago juke, Dirty South hip-hop, stoner metal, Top 40 mall music, and their own sad, pathetic lives. But there’s something kind of crass and obvious about Salem’s music that I just can’t get past. Listening to a song like “Redlights” is like trying to eat one of those horrible fast-food mash-ups like a taco pizza or a Philly cheesesteak burger or Potachos–all those delicious elements should add up to something tasty, but instead it’s just confusing and kinda gross.
So instead, we’ll focus on this other witch house band who call themselves M△S▴C△RA, if for no other reason than because they have at least one song (in the vid below) that, even by witch house standards, is insanely creepy and sounds like it was made by gravers in the midst of a ketamine bender that also included back-t0-back screenings of the Blair Witch movies. We also get a kick out of the fact that, based on the performance videos on this site, the M△S▴C△RA dudes actually appear to be happy witchies. At least the one who’s not wearing a mask keeps cracking a smile. And unlike most witch house, a lot of their stuff is actually uptempo and even kinda dancey. (By which I mean, “doesn’t suck.” By which I also mean, “Yes, nearly all witch house sucks. A lot.”)
We know almost nothing about M△S▴C△RA, but that’s par for the course with your average witch house band–except for Salem, they’re all a giant pain in the ass to research. We can tell you that they have an EP out called Black Mass, they’re apparently based in (or at least near) New York, they have some association with the AMDISCS label, and they’ve collaborated with another witch house artist called Ceremonial Dagger, whose official witchie handle is so symbol-ridden we can’t even begin to figure out how to render it. (You can see it here.)
So ladies and gentlemen, prepare to have some M△S▴C△RA smeared across your face. Make sure all the lights are on before you hit the play button.
P.S. Big ups to one of our readers, Spoon, for suggesting that we cover the witch house scene. We were aware of its existence, mostly because of Salem, but until Spoon suggested we check out GL▲SS †33†H and ///▲▲▲\\\ (aka Void, apparently), we hadn’t fully appreciated its weirdness.
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