For some bands, reinventing the wheel would be a form of sacrilege akin to watching an old bluesman suddenly bust out into Justin Bieber song. So we’re happy to report that Cryptic, the sixth album from undead funk-rockers Here Come the Mummies, is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a band whose previous albums include such WYSIWYG titles as Single Entendre and Bed, Bath and Behind. There are songs are partying, songs about sex, and songs about how too much partying can lead to sex. It’s a sweeping epic about the human condition, really. Baz Luhrmann should buy the film rights.

You can listen to extended clips from all 12 of Cryptic‘s tracks right now on the revamped HCTM website, which has a slick new look and all sorts of interactive features (the fan photos from past shows are especially nifty). And speaking of interactive…here’s a live video of them performing the Cryptic track “Everything But” that was made using the French website Evergig.com, which splices together fan-shot videos into a seamless concert clip. Pretty high-tech for a bunch of dudes who’ve been dead for five thousand years.

Big news from Electric Phantom, the record label home to Chimney Crow and Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin. It arrived on our Facebook page earlier this week in the form of a video press conference hosted by Electric Phantom spokeswoman Melody McGinn and attended by the dying remnants of the music press. Let’s watch, shall we?

Very melodramatic, no? Next time we have a big announcement, we’re totally hiring Melody and her gang of ghouls to make it for us.

So now that you know the big news (you did watch the video, right? if not: Spoiler alert!), head over to electric-phantom.com and check out all the new goodies. Happy shopping.

Photo by Lucinda Roanoke

It’s been a year or three since we last heard from Malaikat dan Singa, the Tuvan throat-singing trance-punk project of Old Time Relijun lead singer Arrington de Dionyso. But just the other day, we got an email from Arrington himself, alerting us to the arrival of a brand-new Malaikat dan Singa album and music video. Thanks, Arrington! It’s because of proactive artists like you that we get to sit on our asses looking at Passed Out Juggalos all day instead of trawling the Interwebs for, y’know, music news and stuff.

Anyway, the album is called Open the Crown and it’s out now on the ever awesome K Records. Based on what we’ve heard of it, we’re happy to report that Arrington is full freakout mode, complete with throat singing, bass clarinet and ranting and raving in his preferred rock ‘n’ roll language, Indonesian—although he now mostly belts out in English. The other new wrinkle here, besides the semi-intelligible English lyrics, is a growing interest in the hip-skankin’ beats, loose-limbed basslines and tape echo of Jamaican dub and reggae—an interest that becomes a full-blown homage in the first Open the Crown song to be released in video form, “I Create in the Broken System.” You might think there’s no connection between throat singing and rude boy toasting, but there’s something in Arrington’s growling delivery that’s totally Tibet by way of Trench Town. Also, there are cheetahs and lions.

You can preview more tracks from Open the Crown and I dunno, maybe buy the damn thing for just $6.99 on the K Records website. Think of it as doing your small part to stick it to The Broken System.

Way back in 2009, when we were still a little ankle-biter of a blog, we wrote a post about a French band called Magma that spawned (the band, not the post) an entire genre of hyper-bizarre prog-rock/space-jazz/freak-fusion called Zeuhl. “Next time you hear a bunch of French dudes chanting nonsense lyrics over music that sounds sort of like Pat Metheny on acid,” we wrote, with that casual air of snark that only comes from having no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, “you’re probably listening to a Zeuhl band.”

Well, it’s taken us four years, but we’ve finally a.) admitted that, to this very day, we often have no idea what the fuck we’re talking about and b.) gotten around to writing about another Zeuhl band. Except this bunch is neither French nor, entirely, dudes. They’re from Japan and they’re a coed ensemble by the name of Koenjihyakkei, which translates to something like “The Hundred Sights of Koenji.” Koenji is a neighborhood in Tokyo, but does it really have a hundred sights? Beats me. Like I said, we often have no idea what the fuck we’re talking about.

Here’s what little we do know: Koenjihyakkei (also sometimes transliterated as “Koenji Hyakkei”) was started in the early ’90s by a drummer named Tatsuya Yoshida, whose previous band, Ruins, did a pretty fair approximation of Magma’s original Zeuhl insanity rendered down to just a bass/drums duo. Having apparently exhausted that format, Yoshida expanded his list of collaborators with Koenjihyakkei, adding a rotating cast of musicians to an increasingly epic and noisy take on Magma-esque jazz-prog mayhem. The band’s most recent lineup, seen in the above photo, features a lady who just goes by AH on vocals, Keiko Komori on reeds, Kengo Sakamoto on bass and Taku Yabuki on keys.

We also know that, sadly, the band appears to have been pretty inactive since about 2010 or so. Yoshida has been more focused on various new incarnations of Ruins: Ruins Alone, which is just him with a drum kit and electronics, and Sax Ruins, which is him with (you’ll never guess) a sax player. He’s also got a guitar/bass/drums power trio called Korekyojinn and a growing online photo archive called Stones of the World. Not pictures of international Rolling Stones cover bands—though that would indeed be awesome—but just pictures of interesting rock formations, made by both humans and nature. Worth a look, especially if you’re into stony things. Did I just make a really lame pot joke? Why, yes, yes I did. Thanks for noticing.

Koenjihyakkei’s music is difficult to describe, even for us. Is it Magma by way of Naked City? Boredoms by way of Shibushirazu Orchestra? Japanese show tunes as performed by “something so far off Broadway it’s on the moon”? (We didn’t come up with that last one, but it kinda sounds like something we would’ve written in 2009.) Whatever it is, it’s more overtly jazz-based than Magma or Ruins, but still prone to going off on the sort of crazy tangents that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Mike Patton side project.

We’ll leave you with two videos that should give you a sense of Koenjihyakkei’s full range of musical lunacy. The first is taken from their 2010 DVD Live at Koenji High and really showcases them (especially vocalist AH) as a sort of a jazz quintet from Mars. The oddly jaunty gang vocals at 2:50 are my favorite part. Also the part where she growls like a demon over some serious ’70s-style prog-rock synth runs. I’m not telling you where to find that part; you’ll just have to listen to the whole goddamned thing yourself.

Next: We would be remiss if we didn’t include the track that MVR (Most Valuable Reader) Stuart Johnson sent our way to introduce us to the awesomeness that is Koenjihyakkei. Thanks, Stuart! For a band that owes much of its existence to a single other band (i.e. Magma), Koenjihyakkei are about as original as it gets.

Links:

• Koenjihyakkei on Skin Graft Records (label site)
• Magaibutsu (Tatsuya Yoshida’s website)
• Koenjihyakkei on MySpace

We’ve got five very different bands this month, so be sure to read more about them below before making your selection. Or fuck it, just vote for the name you like best. It’s not like we can stop you. (P.S. Not trying to bias our readers or anything, but if you don’t think Leprechaun Catering is the best name, there might be something wrong with you.)

Read on to learn more about this month’s bands:

Carl

Carl are a self-described avant-garde, improvisational trio from Austin, Texas. We particularly like this line from their Facebook “About” page: “We like to practice illusion and intimidation through our sound, and promote the exploration of all emotions embedded within the music, by obscuring reality and confusing the senses as well as bathing them in dense stimulation.” Consider us densely stimulated, fellas! You can check out their EP It’s Mom Upside Down via Bandcamp.

Godswounds

This Australian band’s lineup includes Mr. Bungle drummer Danny Heifetz, and they’ve also worked with members of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and The Melvins, which might make them the ringers of this month’s poll. Some Taiwanese magazine described their sound as “a soundtrack to a Kaiju video game nightmare,” which sounds pretty awesome. You can check out their latest album, Death to the Babyboomers, on Bandcamp.

Leprechaun Catering

Photo by Nate Door for Impose Magazine

A reader named Freeman turned us on to this experimental Baltimore duo, so they’re being added to this poll without their knowledge and potentially against their will. So be nice to them, OK? Their label, Ehse Records, says they sound like this: “Imagine if H.R. Pufnstuf and Witchiepoo were at a rave and both fully disembodied in a bottomless k-hole, and were then told that they had to arrange a dance version of Jesus Christ Superstar to be performed by an orchestra consisting of Duane Eddy, Ikue Mori, John Entwistle, Tina Weymouth, Lux Interior, Henry Kissinger, Victor Hugo, Gene Krupa, Eraserhead, Gary Coleman, Stewart Copeland, Clarence Clemons, Jimmy Nolan, Tony Blair, John Belushi, Jimmy Guiffre, Keith Emerson, and Animal from The Muppet Show.” Now you really wanna be nice to them, don’t you? Go to the Ehse Records website and listen to the track called “poulet, poulet-poulet, poulet! 1″ for a taste.

Projet BASF

A reader named Patrick is a huge fan of this moody, psychedelic French band, so we’re also adding them to this month’s poll against their will. We’re running amok, people! Pretty much everything about them is in French, but apparently they were just formed in 2012 and they’re influenced by acid rock and Krautrock and “le drone et le psychédélique.” Here’s their Soundcloud page and here’s a video that’s like Schoolhouse Rock on acid.

SpazmO!

SpazmO! (yes, with an exclamation point and a capital “O”…just to annoy you) is the electro-noise-punk solo project of a dude from Milwaukee named Evan DeBauche, who also runs his own record label and has something like seven others bands. As you might expect from such a relentless multitasker, the music of SpazmO! sounds like it was recorded by someone who was simultaneously shotgunning Five Hour Energy, cleaning out the garage, doing step aerobics and playing Mortal Kombat with his dick. Here’s his Soundcloud.

So there you have it. We’ll close voting at 11:59 p.m. (give or take a minute) on Friday, May 24th. So cast your vote ASAFP and may the weirdest band win!

Getting sprayed with fake blood at a GWAR concert is fun and all, but I bet it pales in comparison to getting sprayed with real blood and/or lighter fluid. And both those things are probably strong possibilities at the 4th Annual GWAR-B-Q, an orgy of loud music and roasted flesh hosted by the greatest alien-god-monster metal band in the universe. Too bad it’s happening in Virginia, or I’d totally go. But I’m pretty sure I still have at least two outstanding warrants in that state. Or was it West Virginia? Either way, I’m out.

But if you’re in that part of the world on Saturday, Aug. 17, you should totally fucking go. In addition to GWAR, the lineup features such stellar purveyors of weird metal as Cannabis Corpse (weed-themed death metal), X-Cops (current and former members of GWAR dressed up as, well, cops) and Kung Fu Dykes (uh…this shit). Also on the bill: the less weird but undeniably awesome Corrosion of Conformity, Municipal Waste, Loincloth and one of my personal favorites, muthafuckin’ Pig Destroyer. Shit is gonna go off, y’all.

Oh, and did we mention they’re also gonna be rolling out the very first GWAR-themed beer, Impaled Ale? Somebody save us a case.

Tickets go on sale June 6th at gwarbq.com. Mark your calendars in the blood of your enemies.

I gotta say, when it comes to dark, nihilistic bands on this blog, I was pretty sure we bottomed out with Mayhem and GG Allin & the Murder Junkies. Turns out I was wrong. Meet Gulaggh (or, if you prefer, :GULAGGH:), the band formerly known as Stalaggh, and prepare to embrace their motto, “Existence is futile.”

Stalaggh came into its futile existence around 2000, when members of the Dutch and Belgian black metal and ambient music scenes came together for the express purpose of making an album that would fill their listeners with despair. To help achieve that goal, they dispensed with the usual growling black metal singers and instead brought in mental patients. Apparently one of the non-crazy (relatively speaking) members of the band works in an insane asylum and was able to get permission to work with some of the patients, under the guise of it being primal scream therapy. Allegedly, among the many “vocalists” the band has worked with in this way is a guy who was institutionalized for killing his mother by stabbing her 30 times.

Stalaggh released three albums between 2002 and 2007: Projekt Nihil, Projekt Terror and their most notorious effort, Projekt Misanthropia. If you Google Stalaggh, one of the first results is an article about Projekt Misanthropia called, “Is This The Worst Album Of All-Time?” (Answer: No. That would be Lou Reed and Metallica’s Lulu.) “Not to go all grandpa on you,” the author of that article declares, “but that’s not music; it’s just noise.”

Well, yes, but it’s morbidly fascinating noise nonetheless. At first, the Stalaggh backstory (as recounted in this interview) set off our bullshit detectors. Black metal dudes round up a bunch of lunatics and record them screaming at each other in an abandoned monastery chapel? That sounds too perfectly horrific to be true. Then we managed to make it through about 20 minutes of Projekt Misanthropia (you can stream the whole damn thing on YouTube) and you know what? We’re pretty sure that’s the sound of a bunch of lunatics screaming at each other. It’s so thick with human suffering and despair that it literally makes your skin crawl. The room seems to get darker the longer you let it play. People avoid eye contact with you for days after you’ve listened to it. It might be the bleakest “music” anyone’s ever recorded.

Not content to stop there, the core members of Stalaggh (who keep their identities a closely guarded secret) formed a new band called Gulaggh in 2008. Where Stalaggh was inspired in part by, and named after, the prisoner-of-war and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, Gulaggh is more directly inspired by the Stalin-era prison camps (gulags) of Soviet Russia. Each album of a proposed Gulaggh trilogy will be named after a different Russian prison camp, and the first album in the trilogy, Vorkuta (the only one released so far), begins with a recording of a Stalin speech.

But Stalin isn’t the creepiest part of Vorkuta. The members of Stalaggh/Gulaggh have one-upped themselves by now incorporating atonally played classical instruments and, scariest of all, the shrieks and screams of women and children: 30 children from a youth mental hospital (it took them over a year to get permission to record them) and a group of what one Gulaggh member calls “damaged women,” by which he means rape victims and ex-prostitutes. The results are, frankly, fucking terrifying. We won’t subject you to the whole thing, but here’s a snippet:

Inevitably, this sort of thing begs the question: Is this “art”? Or is it just horrible, gratuitous noise? In their rare interviews, which mostly seem to be done via email, the members of Stalaggh/Gulaggh tend to sidestep these questions: “We do not like being called any form of  ‘artist’. Art is creative, we are destructive.” But I think the real answer lies somewhere in the middle. But attempting to capture the worst human emotions—fear, pain, anger, hatred, self-loathing, despair—in their rawest form, and placing them in a context that evokes humanity at its worst (the “gh” at the end of both band names stands for “global holocaust”), the mysterious folks behind these projects force listeners to confront their own dark sides with an immediacy that I’m not sure conventional music ever could. There’s some art in that, I think. Then again, they’ve also allegedly prompted at least one fan to nearly kill himself by carving :STALAGGH: into his chest with a knife—so yeah, there’s a gratuitous, sadistic quality to this stuff that certain people respond to, as well.

The thing I actually find most interesting about Stalaggh/Gulaggh is this: Nearly everyone who first hears about the projects assumes that the mentally ill vocalists were somehow abused or tortured during the recording process, or at the very least were recorded without their knowledge or against their will. Wesley, the reader who most recently suggested we check this stuff out (thanks, Wesley!), noted, “Supposedly [the vocals] were mostly recorded in the hallways of a mental institution for the criminally insane,” implying that a.) the patients were unwitting participants and b.) this is what mental institutions usually sound like.

Well, no and no. (We’re not trying to single you out, Wesley; everyone, us included, buys into rumors and false assumptions when confronted with this stuff.) “All patients who have worked with us gave their full written permission,” a band member explained in one interview. “They are not retards, but they suffer from illnesses like schizophrenia, psychosis, borderline, multiple personality syndrome etc. Some of them are a lot more intelligent than normal people.” And, in another interview: “We always tell all vocalists who participate on our projekts what :STALAGGH: is all about. Most of them agree with our ideology….Several of them called recording with us the best therapy they ever had.”

So here’s another level Stalaggh/Gulaggh operates at: It challenges our assumptions about the mentally ill. It turns out you can be filled with almost unimaginable depths of mental anguish and have enough free will to participate in a recording session in which you channel that mental anguish into…well, not music, exactly, but an aural expression of anguish. So the vocalists are not merely the hapless victims of their illness; they are band members and active participants in the Stalaggh/Gulaggh aesthetic, as much as the non-institutionalized people who initiated both projects. At least that’s what I believe. I know plenty of listeners will reject the bands’ explanations about their clinically insane members and just hear sick people being exploited. But I think the reality is more complicated, and more interesting. (Although I do have issues with describing the women on Vorkuta as “damaged.”)

Just to keep us on our toes, however, Gulaggh have announced that the next album in their Stalin-inspired trilogy, Kolyma, will not feature mental patients, at least not exclusively. It will feature vocalists who were born deaf. “Their screams are almost animal like because they have never heard their own voice,” the band explains. “The other interesting thing is that they won’t hear the screams of the others, so it will be much more chaotic.” How it could get any more chaotic than Vorkuta we’re not sure, but Gulaggh will probably find a way.

Links:

• :STALAGGH: on Facebook (fan page)
• Vorkuta on Bandcamp
• Section XIII: Coma (Gulaggh’s current label site)
• Stalaggh on Autopsy Kitchen Records (the label that released Projekt Misanthropia)

Credit: George Salisbury

You know how the last Flaming Lips video, for “Ashes in the Air,” featured an alien with an eyeball for a head and lots of dead naked people? Well, their latest clip features no aliens or death, but it’s pretty much just one big ol’ nakedfest. It’s for “You Lust,” a 13-minute epic of their latest album, The Terror. Thankfully it’s been edited down to more like four minutes for the video, because four minutes is about as much flaccid penis close-ups as I can stand. Watch and you’ll see what I mean. (Heads-up: NSFW on account of it being a nakedfest and all.)

By now I assume y’all are familiar with Winny Puhh, our current #1 Weirdest Band in the World and the pride of Estonia. If you’re not familiar, for the love of all that’s holy go watch the video of their failed bid to represent Estonia at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. We’ll wait.

Did you make it back in one piece? Barely? OK, good. Because I’m about to take what’s left of your senses and assault them even harder with this video for the song “Peetus.”

At first, when someone named Promote Your Product left this clip on our Facebook page, we assumed it was just the work of some  jackass spammer, on account them being named Promote Your Product and all. Then, because it was really good, we assumed it was some new official Winny Puhh video. Then we did a little more digging, and now we’re assuming it was just put together by this guy using found footage.

Ultimately we have no idea what the full story is behind the video, because the clip’s creator, Kirill “agale” Pozharsky, writes everything on his YouTube channel in Russian. But who cares? The video is amazing and really captures the spirit of Winny Puhh. Especially towards the end when everything gets super stabby. (Warning: NSFW. Not like Cattle Decapitation NSFW, but close.)

In other Winny Puhh news: There’s now a Facebook campaign to make them Estonia’s 2014 representative at Eurovision. Go like that shit!

Since regaining the rights to Frank Zappa‘s vast catalog, his heirs over at Zappa Records and Zappa Family Trust have wasted no time in finding new and creative ways to get his music out into the marketplace. Some moves, like selling CDs with a distribution license for $1,000 a pop, have struck us as a bit ill-conceived. But they’ve also put out some cool unreleased material and finally made his stuff available on iTunes, a long overdue boon to those of us who still quaintly insist of paying to download music instead of just listening to Pandora all day.

Even more quaintly, some of us still listen to music on big black pieces of vinyl—and now Zappa Records has those folks covered, too. Next month, they’ll be reissuing two classic Zappa albums on collector’s quality 180-gram vinyl: Freak Out!, the groundbreaking debut from Zappa’s band The Mothers of Invention, and another Mothers mind-bender, 1973′s Over-Nite Sensation, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Damn, I feel old just typing that.

No word yet on the exact release date of these suckers, but keep an eye on the somewhat bewildering Zappa.com site for (hopefully) more info soon. Meantime, let’s play out this post with a golden Frank oldie from Freak Out!, shall we?