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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
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)
Rancid Penguin Molestation
There’s kind of a long story behind how we stumbled across today’s band, so bear with me. It all started when a reader named Steve posted about 87 suggestions for bands we haven’t featured yet. Most of them we’d either heard of or (sorry, Steve) didn’t sound all that interesting, but one jumped out at us. Partially because the band’s name is–pardon me while I copy-paste this shit–Omphalectoicxanthopsia. And partially because Steve, after obsessively including links and/or long descriptions of every other band he mentioned (if you’re really bored, you can read his whole post on our Submit & Vote page), suddenly got all cryptic on us.
“A friend told me they were weird,” Steve wrote. “so I googled them, saw some weird pictures, and just thought “I’m staying the hell away from that”.” And you know us. Anything that makes normal people (and even weirdos like Steve) say “I’m staying the hell away from that”–we dive into it like it’s a swimming pool full of unicorns and rainbows.
So we too Googled Omphawhatchamacallit, and here’s where it gets interesting. It turns out that this band makes something that even I, degenerate that I am, had never heard of before called “pornogrind.” (They also call it “pornoise,” but that seems to be a term they just made up.) And they’re not the only ones. There are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of bands out there tagging their music as “pornogrind.” Apparently I lead a very sheltered life.
At first, based on the first tracks of Omphalectohforfuckssake we could find, I thought pornogrind was just a really harsh form of grindcore on which everything’s so sped up that it just sounds like an ugly smear of ear-fucking noise. That’s basically what their tracks all sounded like, although one did have a wacky acoustic guitar solo buried in it. Then we Googled “pornogrind” and learned that–duh–it’s basically exactly what it sounds like: Grindcore with really, really foul porn-related band names, song titles and I guess lyrics–although the lyrics are without fail completely unintelligible because they’re delivered in that gutteral Cookie Monster style that afflicts so much bad metal these days.
Anyway, long story short, there’s a LOT of these pornogrind bands floating around out there in cyberspace, and after you spend a few hours Googling their names for more info, you’re going to have to spend many more hours clearing your browser history so your girlfriend doesn’t kick you out of the house. Most of the search results for things like “Enema Bath” and “Cock and Ball Torture” (yes, actual band names) are not music-related, is what I’m saying. You have been warned.
Still, we plowed through as many of these pornogrind bands as we could stomach because, hey, the whole damn genre is pretty weird and hey, when you see this much horseshit in one place, there’s just gotta be a pony in there somewhere, right??
Well, no. Here’s the thing about pornogrind: It sucks. All of it. It’s just sped-up death metal/grindcore noise with porn samples and titles like “Anal Cum Shot” and “Regurgitated Semen.” In a way, it’s actually the opposite of weird–it’s the sort of shit 10-year-old boys dream up to gross out their friends, played in a we’re-just-pounding-the-fuck-out-of-our-instruments style almost totally lacking in any of the more technical aspects of true grindcore and extreme metal. It’s probably all meant to be funny on some level, but listen to enough of it and–much like actual porn–it just becomes depressing. Who spends days, weeks and months of their lives writing, rehearsing and recording music in their garage, and then decides, “Hey guys, let’s call ourselves Engorged Vaginal Abyss (yes, another actual band name) and write songs about raping strippers”? Sad people, that’s who.
It was in this context that we stumbled across Rancid Penguin Molestation and their pornogrind parody song/video, “Placenta Pudding Polka.” After all the necrophilia and pedophilia and coprophilia and whatever-philia, it was like a breath of fresh air. Actually, Rancid Penguin Molestation appears to be the work of just one man, a dude from Wisconsin named Cody. Here’s his MySpace page, on which he declares that “Except for grindcore, I detest anything else that ends with a -core.” Amen to that, brother!
So thanks, reader Steve, for sending us down this particular internet rabbit hole and indirectly leading us to so-stupid-it’s-awesome charms of Rancid Penguin Molestation. And in case I wasn’t clear on this point: No, we won’t be featuring any more pornogrind bands. So don’t even ask.
P.S. No, we’re still not sure how being “fart raped” differs from being actually raped. Pretty sure we don’t want to find out though.
Links:
- Madderbass’s YouTube channel (creator of Rancid Penguin Molestation)
- Madderbass’s aka Cody Linder aka Sergeant Nuclear Chicken’s MySpace page
Naked & Shameless
Greetings, weirdlings. Once again, your votes have landed another band on our carefully tended Weird List. So pat yourselves on the back and give it up for Naked & Shameless, the undisputed punk kings of acoustic kitsch rock! (It says so, right on their website.)
We first learned about these roaring drunks right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Buck F. Naked (BFN, to his friends) wrote to us and proposed that we blog about him and his partner, Dave Shameless, and their “brand of Good Times and Strange Salvation.” After a little spirited back and forth on the relative merits of Buck’s band and our website, we finally agreed to a truce and decided to give our readers (or Naked & Shameless’s fans, who–let’s not kid ourselves here–probably outnumber our readers) to vote on whether N&S were weird enough for us. Over 90% of you said, “Hell yes.” So here we are.
Now at first glance, Naked and Shameless might not seem all that weird. They play stripped-down rockabilly-influenced rock (“drunkabilly,” they call it–catchy!), wear Hollywood cowboy hats and Elvis shades, and sing wacky Mojo Nixon-ish songs about what one song neatly sums up as the “Four Food Groups”: caffiene, nicotine, alcohol and pussy. (Mostly alcohol.) Every rockabilly bar in America probably has a house band like this, right?
But it’s at their live shows (or so we hear–haven’t made it out to one ourselves yet) that N&S really bring on the weirdness. There are inflatable bananas. There’s vomit. There’s “pan-substance wrestling,” which apparently consists of Buck finding willing young things in the audience and tussling with them in vats of mud, beer, BBQ sauce or whatever else is handy. Buck’s also been known to drink everything behind the bar, including the cleaning supplies. So there’s a little G.G. Allin in these guys, too…if G.G. were more of a happy drunk and less of a violent, drug-fueled psychopath.
Oh, and then there’s this: Buck married beer. No, really. There was a ceremony with its own website and everything. And by all accounts, their union is still a happy one. So kudos to you, Buck and beer! Turns out some things in this world were meant to last.
Anyhow, here’s a video of Buck’s “I drink everything” stunt, which we really hope is either a clever deception or not something he does much anymore. That can’t be good for the stomach lining. Also, what would beer say? Probably, it’d call you an unfaithful bastard, Buck. And rightly so!
P.S. We’re gonna be in Austin for SXSW, hopefully discovering some new weird bands. If you’re in town and wanna knock back a Shiner with us, hit us up at weirdestbandintheworld@gmail.com. See you in a couple weeks. (No, SXSW isn’t that long…it just takes us that long to sober up.)
Links:
- Naked and Shameless official site
- Naked and Shameless on MySpace
- Naked and Shameless YouTube channel
Zayde Buti
Once again, democracy has struck here at TWBITW. Our readers have spoken, and they deemed the most recent entrant on our Submit and Vote page to be weird by the widest margin we’ve ever seen. In fact, if your votes are anything to go by, Zayde Buti might be the weirdest thing we’ve ever blogged about. Either that, or he spent way too much time voting for himself over and over again. (We really should close that loophole. We keep meaning to.)
Including Zayde on The Weird List is a bit of a cheat–not because he’s a solo artist (although some of our more pedantic readers take issue with every solo act we’ve ever listed), but because he’s really more of a performance artist than a musical act. And calling a performance artist weird is a little like observing that kittens are cute. Weird is what performance artists do–and as you can probably tell from the above photo, Zayde certainly comes through on that count.
But music is definitely a major part of Zayde’s act. He’s even got an album out: It’s called I’m Lovin’ It and yes, that’s a McDonald’s reference. You see, Zayde seems to be endlessly fascinated with the advertising slogans and iconography of fast food–that’s actually a Wendy’s wig he’s wearing in his publicity photo. In Boston, where he’s based, he has a one-man show called “Hungry,” and he’s also been known to do guerrilla theatre performances where he dresses up like a Dunkin’ Donuts employee and does song and dance routines for unsuspecting DD customers. It’s all very subversive…or at the very least, it confuses the hell out of the actual employees in pretty entertaining ways.
I’m Lovin’ It is streaming in full on Soundcloud, and it’s worth checking out. If Weird Al Yankovic got together with those guys who do the “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” song and made an entire album inspired by Naomi Klein’s No Logo…well, actually, that would probably be a train-wreck, but I’m Lovin’ It has its moments. Still, for the full Zayde Buti experience, you really have to watch one of his videos. They’re all pretty bizarre, but this one called “Hot ‘n Juicy” really takes the cake. Or burger. Or something.
Links:
The Wet Spots
We were turned on (no pun intended) to today’s weird band by my friend Julia, who knows people in that whole polyamory community–you know, the people we used to called “swingers,” before they decided to develop a whole code of ethics and openness and mutual consent and take all the fun out of sleeping around. (I kid, I kid! Polyamory rocks, if that’s your thing. I can barely handle one intimate relationship at a time, but that’s just me.) Anyway, apparently this duo called The Wet Spots is pretty popular with the poly crowd–as well they should be. I mean, being kinky has always sounded like fun–but rarely has it sounded this totally adorable and non-threatening, too.
The Wet Spots are a husband and wife duo from Vancouver–yes, they’re Canadian, which makes sense given that Canada is easily the most adorable and non-threatening nation in the Western Hemisphere. Before they were the Wet Spots, Cass King was a sex columnist, and John Woods played in punk bands. Now they present themselves as sort of a hotel lounge act that does breezy, jazzy songs about anal sex, fisting, foot fetishes, polyamory and pretty much anything else you can think of that any combination of healthy, open-minded folks might do to get each other off. It’s like Cole Porter meets Penthouse Forum, except the girls get to come more. And the Cole Porter stand-in isn’t wearing any pants.
To get a sense a better sense of The Wet Spots’ unique mix of naughty and nice, there’s a clip of them doing a show at Burning Man in 2008 that’s pretty fun. (You’ll know they’re really at Burning Man about 25 seconds in, when a dude in Mad Max drag walks through the frame looking for a seat.) But to really hear them at their most outrageous, we just had to present the official video for their most famous song, “Do You Take It?” Totally NSFW…and totally adorable. Oh, Canada.
Links:
- The Wet Spots official site (Note: Literally as we were writing this, the entire site was replaced with an “Account Suspended” screen. Looks like somebody
‘s a prudeforgot to pay their domain hosting bill!)(Newer note: It’s back up again. Whew!) - The Wet Spots on MySpace
- The Wet Spots on Facebook
- The Wet Spots Work Up a Blather (Wet Spots official blog)
Gonken
I gotta be honest: I’m not sure how I feel about starting our second year of Weirdest Band in the World with this guy. But you, our cracked-out readers, have spoken, and the votes are in: after a ridiculously long tenure on our “Submit and Vote” page (we kept hoping the “no” votes would pile up, but no such luck), this Gonken character has been declared weird. And yeah, I guess he is. At least he gets points for trying.
Here’s the deal: No single thing Johnny Gonken has ever attempted in his now fairly long career is either especially weird or especially good. But when you add it all up, there’s a sort of dogged determination to it all that’s kind of amazing. I mean, you name it, this Gonken dude has done it. Nerdcore-inspired electro-punk-rap opuses with titles like Robot vs. Zombie? Check. Catchy synth-punk, complete with low-budget video featuring random hot chick? Got it covered. Fake Lost-style government training videos? All over it. A Halloween record? Fuck yeah. Acoustic, Flight of the Conchords-style novelty tunes? Hey, how hard can it be? A commercial jingle for the Shake Weight? Sure, why fucking not?
Through it all, Gonken has endured obscurity, negative reviews and judging from the clip below, awkwardly small crowds for most of his shows. But he perseveres, writing songs with titles like “The Butterfly Reject” and “Hate Is For People With Hearts” and clearly, on some level, reveling in his outsider, misunderstood-artist status. Success would probably ruin this guy.
So you know what? We just convinced ourselves. Gonken, you are one weird fucking dude. Keep doing what you’re doing, and fuck the haters. Including us. (And we hope that guy in the robot costume is well-paid. Or at least gets lots of free trips to Taco Bell.)
Links:
The Metal Shakespeare Company
Even though we blog together, roomed together in college and have probably gotten drunk together more times than Tiger Woods cheated on his wife, the truth is that Eddie and I have pretty radicaly different taste in music. Where I tend to go more for the headbang/facemelt school of rawk, Eddie mostly prefers bands you can listen to without fear of spilling your part-skim soy latte. Highbrow high-fallutin sissy music, as I like to call it–but only to his face, because it’s fun to watch the way it makes his ears turn red.
But the other day, our pal Nicole (thanks, Nicole!) turned us on to a band that, for once, we can both agree on. They’re called The Metal Shakespeare Company and their name says it all, really. If Ozzy even played a Renaissance Faire (yeah, like that’ll ever happen), it would probably sound like these guys.
Anyway, this video pretty much tells you everything you need to know about these guys. Has theater geek dorkiness ever looked this awesome? I thinkest not.
(All lyrics by Shakespeare himself, or so the band claims. I’m frankly not that up on my Bard quotes, and even if I was, most of the time the strangled cries of lead singer Lord Simms are pretty much impossible to understand, anyway.)
Links:
Mojo Nixon
We’re kind of late to the party on this one, but as most of his fans probably know by now, Mojo muthaufuckin Nixon is back, baby! Mr. Bo-Day-Shuss hisself got some attention a few weeks ago when he announced that he’s be making his entire catalog available for free download on Amazon.com, and even more attention this week when it was revealed that Amazon users have downloaded over one million Mojo Nixon songs. So suck it, Radiohead!
Obviously, this is all great news, because Mojo Nixon is without doubt one of the great underated artists of the eighties…or any era, for that matter. His loopy rockabilly songs celebrate and poke well-deserved fun at all the pop culture trash that makes America great, everything from MTV VJs (“Stuffin Marthas Muffin”) to Elvis (“Elvis Is Everywhere”) to the Eagles (“Don Henley Must Die”) to Debbie Gibson (“Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child”). He’s even got a new album out called Whiskey Rebellion that goes after Dr. Laura and Judge Judy. Clearly, this man has a television and he’s not afraid to use it.
Musically, Nixon isn’t all that weird…he’s just a satirist with an Elvis fixation…but the decision to make his entire catalog available for free makes him deserving of a shout-out on TWBITW, we think. Here’s what the man himself said about his million downloads feat:
“Great googley moogley. I’m almost speechless. A million Mojo songs stirring up trouble across this great land. I’m a cult artist and apparently I’ve grown the cult and made the cult happy. A little blast of joy in these dark and desperate times. A retired lunatic with no Facebook, no Twitter, no MySpace or tour. Not even an e-mail list. Never underestimate the power of the Mojosity. The true sound of the American nutjob is forever. You can’t kill rock ‘n roll. The question is–did I lose a million dollars or gain a million fans?”
The free download part is supposedly gonna end any day now, so get your ass over to Amazon.com and start downloading. Meanwhile, here’s a little reminder of why it’s Mojo Nixon’s world, we just live in it. (And yes, that’s Winona Ryder.)
Links:
Beatallica
Let’s face it, most cover bands suck. Why would I pay money to see a bunch of no-name dudes pretending to be The Doors or Creedence Clearwater Revival? Oh, wait, Eddie tells me that those are actually the current incarnations of The Doors and CCR. But you get the idea…cover bands are basically just something like Creedence Clearwater Revisted, but with a thick extra layer of suck owing to the fact that no one in the band ever even met John Fogerty, let alone got a cease & desist letter from his lawyers. It’s just kareoke with instruments.
Still, a fair number of cover bands out there manage to liven things up by being, say, a bunch of hot chicks playing cock rock, or sticking a fat Elvis impersonator out front for no apparent reason. Then there’s Beatallica, who manage the neat trick of being two cover bands for the price of one. Yes, Beatallica is a Metallica/Beatles mashup cover band. I shit you not.
Beatallica would be awesome enough just on the basis of song and album titles like “Got to Get You Trapped Under Ice” and Sgt. Hetfield’s Motorbreath Pub Band. But the kicker is that they’re actually kind of good. Check on the clip below for “All You Need Is Blood” and tell me it doesn’t make you want to bang your head…or at least laugh your ass off.
Links:
