Category Archives: Uncategorized
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 ’80s.
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 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 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.
Links:
Lenny Pickett with the Borneo Horns
Ready for a little trip back into the vaults, kids? Back in 1991, Saturday Night Live saxophonist Lenny Pickett released this now super-obscure and hard-to-find album with his band, the Borneo Horns, which consisted of him and two other sax players (Steve Elson and Stan Harrison), plus a drummer and occasional additional horns. Now, while they’re hardly the only predominantly sax-based band that ever existed (see also: World Saxophone Quartet and one of our favorites, the skronk-tastic Little Women), they’re arguably the funkiest. A typical Borneo Horns joint sounds like a cross between James Brown, a New Orleans parade band and the theme music from Benny Hill. You can’t decide to whether to dance your ass off or laugh your ass off–and both are probably equally valid responses.
I was lucky enough to see the Borneo Horns in college back around the time the album came out (which I swear was in ’89, but Amazon.com has it listed as ’91 and I was admittedly drunk a lot back then) and let me tell you, they could rock it out. Pickett is mostly famous these days for those wailing high notes he squeezes out as that week’s SNL host bounds onto the stage, but he’s also got an amazing sense of rhythm and syncopation. He got his start playing in the horn section of funk band Tower of Power and that stuff is clearly in his blood.
These days, it’s hard to come by much information about the Borneo Horns, let alone their actual music. The one and only Lenny Pickett with the Borneo Horns album is out of print and will set you back upwards of $200 for a used vinyl copy. The blog Music Hertz has a good little piece about the album, and you can hear several Borneo Horns tracks on Lenny Pickett’s sorta cool, sorta annoying official website. But beyond that, the genius of the Borneo Horns has been mostly lost in the mists of time. Which really has me kicking myself, because I used to own a cassette copy of Lenny Pickett with the Borneo Horns and I have no idea where it is now. I purged most of my cassettes years ago, so it’s probably gathering dust in a Goodwill somewhere.
Fortunately, some kind soul did post this one Borneo Horns track on YouTube, so we can share some of Lenny’s funky magic here. Cooler than the SNL theme music, isn’t it?
Links:
- Lenny Pickett official site (we think)
- Lenny Pickett & the Borneo Horns on MySpace (probably unofficial…no band info, just one uploaded song)
- Lenny Pickett page on NYU Steinhardt School site (yep, he’s a jazz professor)
- Lenny Pickett on Facebook (fan page)
Primus
Guess what, weirdlings? Today’s our second anniversary! What’d you get us? That’s okay…your “presence” is better than any “presents.” (Don’t you hate when people say that?)
We like to mark this annual milestone in TWBITW’s continuing quest for blogosphere domination by giving props to a classic weird band…you know, one of those acts that’s been around for so long and enjoyed so much success that people tend to take their weirdness for granted. Last year, for our first anniversary, we gave up the funk for Parliament-Funkadelic; this year, we’d like to tip our big brown beaver hat to Primus, a band that after more than 20 years together continues to be the gold standard when it comes to freaky, funky, Zappa-inspired experimental rock.
Primus actually has a new album coming out next month called Green Naugahyde, their first in over a decade. Spin is previewing the first single, “Tragedy’s A-Comin’”, and it sounds pretty much exactly how Primus have always sounded: a jazz/funk/rock jam held together by Les Claypool’s trademark slap-bass and mumbly, sing-speak vocals. They’re nothing if not consistent.
If it’s hard to describe the Primus sound (“thrash-funk meets Don Knots” is probably our favorite), it’s even harder to explain what makes them weird, exactly. They do dress a little quirky; they definitely make bizarre videos; and Claypool does things with his bass guitar that it was never meant to do, bending notes with a whammy bar, using all sorts of distortion pedals, and slapping out polyrhythms that would reduce the thumbs of mere mortal bassists to hamburger in a matter of minutes. But really, it all just comes down to the fact that Primus’ music, for all its obvious influences—Frank Zappa, King Crimson, the Residents—sounds like nothing else except Primus.
That said, those videos are awfully damn weird, too. By now, even your grandmother has probably seen the clip for “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver“—so even though it is indeed awesome, we’d like to share this less famous but equally bizarre, single-take video for “Mr. Krinkle” off 1993′s Pork Soda. Yes, someone was doing single-take music videos long before OK Go ever came along. Watch and learn, kids.
Links:
- Primus official site
- Primus on MySpace
- Primus on Facebook
- Prawn Song Records site (Les Claypool’s label)
- Les Claypool official site
- Les Claypool on MySpace
- Club Bastardo (Primus and Les Claypool merch site)
- Claypool Cellars (Les Claypool’s boutique wine label)
Here Come the Mummies
It’s Friday, and Jake and I are ready to get on down with our bad selves. And who better to get down with than a bunch of dudes playing hammy funk-rock while done up in full-bandage mummy attire? No one, we say!
Here Come the Mummies are based in Nashville and keep their identities secret, so naturally there’s a lot of speculation as to who might be lurking under those mummy rags. One thing’s for certain: It’s not these guys. That’s a completely different band from California just called The Mummies, who actually pre-date Here Come the Mummies by a good decade. We’ll probably put The Mummies on the Weird List at some point, too—although they play snotty, DIY punk, which is actually sort of what we’d expect a bunch of mummies to sound like. Here Come the Mummies, by contrast, sound more like a cross between Fitz & the Tantrums and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which is totally unexpected and therefore, we think, kind of awesome. There is not much mummy iconography in funk and soul music. Not even P-Funk, as far as we know, ever had anyone in full Boris Karloff drag lurching around the stage. These guys are breaking new ground.
Oh yeah—and they are also the proud inventors of the Cowbelt. Did we mention that these are naughty mummies?
The Here Come the Mummies live show looks pretty fun, but the best YouTube videos featuring the group were all actually shot for a syndicated radio program called The Bob & Tom Show. If you don’t mind the occasional annoying laughs of the hosts, the sound quality here is excellent—and proof that whoever these guys are, and however silly their whole horndog mummy shtick may be, they can play.
Links:
Lightning Bolt
(Photo by Sam Ashley)
If you ask me (and I know you probably didn’t but I’ll tell you anyway), the spirit of punk rock has always been about two things: 1.) keeping it simple and 2.) rocking the fuck out. By those standards, Lightning Bolt are punk as fuck.
Guitars? Who needs ‘em? Lightning Bolt get by with just a bass and a drum kit. (And it’s worth pointing out that they were doing this years before Death From Above 1979, who are awesome in their own way, but not as original, not as weird and definitely not punk as fuck.) Stage diving? Sorry, kids, there’s no stage.* Lightning Bolt prefer to set up right on the floor, with a bunch of Marshall amp stacks as their backdrop. The fans crowd around the band in a seething semi-circle that someone on YouTube aptly described as looking like “psycho-spermatozoa assaulting an epileptic ovule.”
So that’s the punk part. The weird part? That mostly comes courtesy of drummer/singer Brian Chippendale. Early on the band’s development, Chippendale solved the problem of how to be a singing drummer when you drum like you’re having a seizure in a pretty brilliant, makeshift way: He took the microphone out of a telephone receiver** and secured it to his face using a hood that looks sort of like a cross between a Mexican wrestling mask and something one of the guys from Slipknot would wear. Oh and did we mention he drums like he’s having a seizure? So yeah, watching Chippendale do his thing is pretty riveting stuff. The bassist, Brian Gibson, makes up for his more pedestrian stage presence mostly with volume. Those Marshall stacks aren’t just for show.
Lightning Bolt have made a handful of freaky music videos over the years, but the best way to experience their music is still live. (So we hear; we haven’t had the pleasure.) So here’s a clip of them rocking it live at a show in France in 2008. Vive le noise! Or something like that.
*Apparently, at some of their more recent shows, Lightning Bolt have finally started playing on stages. “Some of these shows have gotten too big and ridiculous, and that’s why we move to the stage,” Chippendale explained in an interview with The Stranger. “It’s just not fun or safe. Kids who complain when we play on the stage, I tell them sorry you missed it”–”it” being the “play on the floor” days of yore.
**Sorta like our hero, Bob Log III.
Links:
Gidropony
Today’s weird band was brought to our attention by a reader called Hola-Ebola, who is rapidly emerging as our new MVR (Most Valuable Reader). Hola-Ebola (“H to the Ezzo” to his friends) also turned us on to Dirty Sanchez. Truly, H-E, you are a veritable geyser of weirdness.
This band is called Gidropony, which is apparently Russian for “hydroponic”–or so says the one English-language article was could find on this band. That article also notes that the band hails from the small industrial city of Saransk, about 400 miles east of Moscow, in what is apparently the Russian equivalent of the Rust Belt. And there’s definitely something uniquely Russian about Gidropony’s mishmash sound, which mixes the crazy videogame synths of chiptune with elements of punk, electro and drum ‘n’ bass in what sounds like some bored Russian kids’ vague, thirdhand idea of what hipsters in Brooklyn must be listening to. They’re like the aural equivalent of cheap knockoff Levi’s, or that fake version of Donkey Kong you downloaded off BitTorrent that bombs your PC with Russian porn pop-ups.
Gidropony, who appear to be made up of a guy-girl duo plus some additional live musicians, call their sound “discoviolence” (also name of one of their records, which you can actually buy on Amazon) or sometimes just “trash.” Occasionally it’s downright catchy, other times it sounds like someone having a Nintendo-induced seizure. And when they make videos for their songs, they really delve into the pop-culture scrap heap, as they do on this fairly mind-blowing clip. Warning: it gets dirty. And we’re not just saying that to get you to watch to the end.
Links:
Powerglove
God, metalheads are such dorks. The latest proof of that statement comes from Boston, Mass. (home of another of our favorite dorky metal bands, Bang Camaro) in the form of Powerglove, an instrumental metal quartet who specialize in doing headbanging covers of videogame theme songs. Although for their latest album, Saturday Morning Apocalypse, they branched out into the slightly less 8-bit world of Saturday morning cartoon soundtracks. Don’t choke on your Froot Loops, kids!
In the studio, Powerglove’s sound actually makes so much sense that it’s hard to even categorize them as weird. The theme music for things like The Simpsons and Power Rangers actually sounds pretty OK done as melodramatic speed metal. It’s really their live show where things start to get a little WTF. Two of the guys are in sort of half-KISS drag, but another one’s sitting in a chair like they just wheeled him in from a marathon coding session and stuck a guitar in his lap. Or maybe he’s in a wheelchair? Does anyone know? Were we just unintentionally offensive to the disabled community? Wouldn’t be the first time. Wait, here the same dude is standing up, at another gig eight months earlier. Did he sprain an ankle? The mystery deepens. (Also, why are both shows in Montreal? Do French-Canadians have some weird vintage videogame fetish we don’t know about?)
Anyhow, Powerglove just released their crowning achievement in weirdness: They shot a video for their cover of the “Batman” cartoon theme music in which they cast themselves as characters in their own videogame. “I programmed several video game fight scenarios with the band as playable characters and recorded takes of me playing through the mini games,” guitarist Chris Marchiel explains in a press release. Like I said…dorks!
Links:
- Powerglove official site
- Powerglove’s YouTube channel
- Powerglove on Facebook
- Powerglove on MySpace (for now)
Prussian Blue
I don’t know about you, but if I was a white supremacist, I’m pretty sure hardcore punk would be my soundtrack of choice. I mean, if you’re gonna go around hating the vast majority of all other people on the planet all day, you need to be listening to something that’s gonna keep you revved up. Keep those hate juices flowing, so to speak.
And for the most part, actual white supremacists seem to agree with me. Google the words “white power music” and you get lots of smashy-smashy, shouty-shouty anthems from bands with names like Skrewdriver and Xenophobe and Max Resist and Blue Eyed Devils, who all pretty much sound like early Black Flag, except with lyrics like, “Now I’ll fight for my race and nation, Sieg Heil!”—which, by the way, is an actual lyric from a Blue Eyed Devils song called “White Victory.” No, these people are not fucking around. Most of them think Hitler was actually a pretty swell guy (although they also tend to think the Holocaust didn’t happen, which is a pretty convenient way to take some of the stink off the whole Hitler-loving thing).
Given this backdrop, it’s all the more bizarre that a band like Prussian Blue ever existed. For one brief shining moment, white power music had its Carpenters, its Hanson and its Jewel all rolled into one adorable little blonde-haired, blue-eyed package—and mainstream media lost their fucking minds over it.
Prussian Blue was a folk-pop duo from Bakersfield, California, made up of twin sisters Lamb and Lynx Gaede (yes, their actual names). They began performing together at the age of nine at the behest of their mother, April, who basically made the two girls mouthpieces for her racist world view before they were really old enough to fully grasp the significance of what they were singing about.
At first, they were cute but kinda terrible, doing tentative, slightly off-key Skrewdriver covers and goofy originals like “Skinhead Boy” (“Oi oi oi, skinhead boy, you’re my oi boy”). But by their second album, The Path We Chose (which came out when the girls were seasoned concert vets and all of thirteen), they had actually gotten pretty good. But by then, the novelty value had worn off and the mainstream media went back to ignoring them. And soon after that, they started covering Bob Dylan (“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which would actually be a great white supremacist song if it hadn’t been written by a hippie Jew from New York City), and pretty soon the white supremacist community was ignoring them too. By 2006, at fourteen, they were done.
Today the girls live in Montana and have disavowed their up-with-whitey roots entirely. “I love diversity,” Lynx told an interviewer for The Daily just a few weeks ago. “It makes me proud of humanity every day that we have so many different places and people.”
They’ve also become big medical marijuana advocates, mostly because they use pot to treat a whole host of medical issues that you have to figure are either the result of bad karma or the stress of being the target of so much public outrage at such a tender age. Lynx has cancer and something called CVS, which stands for Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome (and you thought the drug store chain was bad). Lamb has scoliosis and chronic back pain. You have to feel sorry for them—even though reading some of the interviews they gave back in their Prussian Blue days is pretty cringe-inducing.
“I like everything except nigger music,” Lamb told an interviewer for Resistance, the magazine put out by their record label of the same name. Although they also told an interviewer for Vice magazine who asked the same question: “But our all-time favorite is Barney the purple dinosaur!”
So here they are, in all their Aryan glory: Prussian Blue. Don’t let the cuteness brainwash you into hating black people. Or white people, for that matter. It’s not our fault that some of us white folks are ignorant, hate-filled people who dress their children up like Sound of Music extras and coax them into singing about the coming race war like it’s “Kumbaya.”
Links:
- Resistance Records official site (Prussian Blue’s record label)
- Prussian Blue interview in Vice
- Interview with Lamb and Lynx Gaede in The Daily
- Prussian Blue Sucks (anti-fan site)
Dirty Sanchez
(Photo by Austin Young)
Today’s band was suggested by a reader called Hola-Ebola…and no, they have nothing to do with the Jackass-like British TV series Dirty Sanchez, although those guys are pretty great. This Dirty Sanchez is an electroclash band from Los Angeles. What is electroclash, you ask? Well, I’m no expert, but as far as I can tell, it seems to be an intentionally cheesy/campy style of dance music with lots of songs about cocaine and gay sex and Hollywood. I think Lady Gaga probably ripped off half her act from the electroclash scene.
Anyways, there are loads of weird electroclash acts out there, like Fischerspooner, Peaches, Chicks on Speed and Princess Superstar. But Dirty Sanchez stand out for a couple reasons. First, many of their songs are just flat-out, hilariously bizarre, as you can tell from just the song titles alone: “Fucking on the Dancefloor,” “Really Rich Italian Satanists,” “Tranny Sex,” “We Hate Youth and Beauty.” Second, they seem to be one of the few (only?) electroclash bands to feature a full-on tranvestite as one of their lead singers. His/her name is Jackie Beat and even though I feel kinda gay for saying this, she rules. In their early videos, she’s like a cross between Dee Snider and Cher. Now she looks more like a cross between Eddie Izzard and that fat chick from The Gossip, but she’s still pretty fabulous. (Did I just use the word “fabulous” to describe a drag queen? Wow, now I really feel gay.)
Dirty Sanchez seem to have been inactive since 2008–that’s the last time their website news was updated (back then, they said they were working on a new album, their second one, but it doesn’t seem like it’s ever come out) and also the year they released a new single, “Give Head and Be Beautiful.” Here’s the video for it, which for our money is the most awesomely weird thing they’ve ever done. Next time I go out dancing, I’m totally gonna picture everyone with their heads off.
(Update: It seems like Jackie Beat is now based in New York and might be more focused on her cabaret act and her solo career–although it also seems like she forgot to pay her domain name bill, so it’s hard for us to confirm this. Still, this parody video posted in late 2009 does feature fellow Dirty Sanchezian Mario Diaz, so there’s still hope we may hear more from Dirty Sanchez yet.)
Links:
- Dirty Sanchez official site
- Dirty Sanchez on MySpace
- Jackie Beat official site (currently down)
- Barbeau official site (Dirty Sanchez DJ/producer)
Dolchnakov Brigade
Who says our democracy is broken? Once again, our readers have spoken! And by spoken, I mean clicked little buttons on our Submit and Vote page. And what they have told us is this: Dolchnakov Brigade are a really weird fucking band.
How weird, you ask? Well, they didn’t receive a single “Not weird” vote, which in the entire history of TWBITW has never…oh wait, sorry it’s actually happened before four other times. Still, not too shabby.
Beyond that, what can we tell you about these guys? Honestly, not much. The “About Us” page of their website is just a random list of shit like “crawling creatures” and “Bruce Lee” and “Rush Limbaugh in a coma.” Which is kind of an awesome way to describe your band, but not very helpful to us bloggers. We want easy answers, Dolchnakov Brigade! Why do you deny us the simple pleasures our short attention spans demand?
But with a little digging, here’s what else we’ve found out: They seem Russian but they’re actually from Brooklyn. (Okay, we didn’t actually have to dig for that one…they emailed and told us.) Their music is basically lo-fi, campy synth-pop. We’re pretty sure the main guy is named Clark Silkmer, but he might also be a dude named Shlomi Lavie who, randomly, is also the drummer for Marcy Playground. (Yes, they’re still around; we were surprised, too.) The other band members seem to consist of two backup dancer/singers, a keyboard player, and a rubber rat named RAT! who produces their beats on an MPC pad. They have a Tumblr. The organizing principal behind the band is summed up by the word “Palevish” which we thought was Russian but we think now might just be made up. The band’s official website describes it like this:
“Palevish! (pronounced Pal-Eh-Veesh) is the concept of taking a seemingly random and meaningless idea and repetitively executing it with full conviction like it was a matter of life and death. Then, at some point, it becomes a matter of life and death.”
I can get behind that. Kinda sounds like the organizing principal behind this whole blog, actually.
And who knows? Maybe that’s all you really need to know about Dolchnakov Brigade. Or maybe they’ll reveal more about themselves when they feel the world is ready.
Their live show still seems to be a bit of a work in progress, but they have made a few low-budg videos that are pretty creepy/hilarious. Here’s the one for their catchiest tune, “Onion Is the Underdog.” Respect!
Links:
- Dolchnakov Brigade official site
- Dolchnakov on MySpace
- Dolchnakov Brigade on Tumblr
- Dolchnakov Brigade on Facebook
