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The Upper Crust

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Photo by Jay Elliott

Finally, a rock band for the one percent! The Upper Crust are an AC/DC-loving band from Boston who perform their swaggering cock-rock (or “rocque and roll,” as they like to call it) dressed in the powdered wigs, buckled shoes and ruffled finery of 18th century French aristocrats. They stay rigorously in character throughout, sneering at the “foul congregation” of their plebeian fans and raising their pinkie fingers between songs in a foppish variation of the classic devil horns gesture. It’s the Ancien Régime by way of Aerosmith, Bon Scott in breeches. And like a lot of our favorite super-gimmicky bands, it’s a great example of a silly, one-note idea run so far into the ground it’s struck a gusher of some sticky black substance resembling genius.

The main madman behind The Upper Crust is Nat Freedberg, aka Lord Bendover, who’s been toiling away in various semi-obscure (and completely obscure) Boston bands since the ’80s. (This article gives some good background.) He started The Upper Crust in 1995 with a lineup that’s undergone surprisingly few changes since: A third guitarist, Lord Rockingham, dropped out fairly early, and they swapped out bassists at some point, but second singer/guitarist the Duc D’Istortion (“a student of the manly art of fisticuffs,” according to his official bio) and drummer Jackie Kickassis (an “effervescent personage” with a fondness for “the verses of the ancient homosexual poets”) have been with the group since day one. Most non-joke bands would kill for that kind of continuity.

The Upper Crust have released three original studio LPs, a live album, and a “greatest hits” collection, Cream of the Crust. The track titles alone are worth the price of admission: “Once More Into the Breeches,” “We’re Finished With Finishing School,” “Come Hither Fair Youth,” a live DVD called Horse & Buggery. As far as we can tell, they haven’t done much since releasing their last album, Revenge for Imagined Slights, in 2009. The only event listed on their official website (by their faithful manservant, Bumbles) is a benefit concert that happened back in April. “It is not sheer greed that drives them as usual,” Bumbles writes, in a commoner’s fumbling attempt to mimic the arch wit of his lordships. Oh, I bet you tasted the lash for that impertinent remark, Bumbles!

We would be remiss not to include a huzzah here for Rico Gagliano, co-host of public radio show/podcast The Dinner Party, who introduced us to The Upper Crust when I was a guest on his show back in February. (What do you mean you missed it? For shame. Lucky for you there’s an Internet now for archiving such things.)

Here’s the fuzzy but still pretty awesome video for one of The Upper Crust’s signature tunes, “Let the Eat Rock,” originally released circa 1995. Keep an eye out for the coal-fired guitar amp. These dudes were steam punks before steam punk even existed.

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Waylander

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Usually, we don’t get to post much around St. Patrick’s Day, because we’re too busy dodging drunk hipsters and scarfing down free tacos at SXSW. But we’re skipping the Austin trip this year, which means I finally have a chance to honor the patron saint of Ireland with a discussion of one of my favorite obscure subgenres of heavy music: pagan Celtic folk metal.

1993 was year zero for this stuff. That year, apparently by sheer coincidence, three bands popped up that came to define the sound: Cruachan, Primordial and Waylander. Cruachan is probably the most “traditional” of the three, mixing melodies and instruments swiped from Irish folk music with a classic headbanger sound. Primordial is more of a straight-up black metal band that only sounds Irish if you pay attention to the lyrics. But for my whiskey money, Waylander was and is the coolest of the three, since they sound like a knife fight between Sepultura and the steerage band from Titanic. Tin whistles have never before sounded this awesomely evil.

You might think heavy metal inspired by the music and history of pre-Christian Ireland would be a limited field, but there are actually a shit-ton of bands from all over the world who mix some combination of “pagan,” “Celtic,” “folk” and “shred” into their music. Some of the most Celtic-sounding ones aren’t even from Ireland…take Eluveitie, for example, who are from fucking Switzerland of all places and sound like some kind of horrendous mix of the Chieftains, Evanescence, Enya and your kid brother’s shitty screamo band. Technically, I suppose their clash of styles is even weirder than Waylander’s, but I don’t wanna piss off St. Patrick by picking a non-Irish band for this week’s feature.

Two other Celtic metal bands worth mentioning, just because they’re fucking awesome:

Mael Mórdha have been around almost as long as the O.G. Celtic metal bands, but they describe their sound as “Gaelic doom metal,” which basically means they sound even more evil than Waylander. They once appeared on You’re a Star, which is sort of an Irish version of The X Factor, with predictably sad/funny results: The clueless judges forced them to play a cover of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” before sending them packing. (It’s immortalized on YouTube, if you’re into watching noble Irish metal bands humiliate themselves before the gods of television.)

Celtachor are the new kids on the Celtic metal block, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say they rock the hardest of anyone in the genre yet. Give this track “Rise of Lugh” a spin and tell me it doesn’t lay waste to all before it.

Still, I gotta give the weird props to Waylander this week, for being one of the first bands to come up with this stuff, and for still rocking it nearly 20 years later. As I write this, they’re back in the studio hard at work on their fourth album, Kindred Spirits, which they plan to release later this year. I hope they’ll take a break this Saturday to down a pint of Guinness or five.

Bonus video! Here’s a clip of Waylander’s live show. That guy playing mandolin and tin whistle would probably be wearing a kilt if they made one big enough to cover the gigantic balls it must take to play mandolin and tin whistle in a metal band. Oh, and I guess kilts are Scottish, not Irish. So there’s that, too.

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Weirdify Playlist 5: Mental Metal

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What’s up, weirdos? Jake here, ready to melt your face off with our latest Spotify playlist. This week’s theme: Heavy metal, in all its skull-crushing, finger-tapping, demon-growling glory. Plus one sensitive grindcore piano ballad, because we know how those grindcore kids love the lighters-up moments.

Fire up your Spotify and strap in. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

1. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, “Helpless Corpses Enactment.” I’m not letting you people off easy this week. I’m throwing you right into the deep end of weird metal with a track from this sadly defunct San Francisco outfit, who did things to heavy music only a pretentious bunch of Bay Area art freaks could do.

2. Demon Tool, “La Naissance du Mal.” I’ll be honest: I found this track when I was looking for something from Tool. But it turns out Tool has licensed exactly zero of its catalog to Spotify, so you’ll have to settle for this obscure band that just happens to have Tool in their name. Plus, they sing in French, which is kinda weird in this context. It’s hard to sound demonic when you’re growling in the language of love.

3. Mayhem, “Buried by Time and Dust.” The original and greatest Norwegian black metal band. This track is from their classic 1994 album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, which means you’re hearing dead guitarist Euronymous playing alongside the man who murdered him, bassist Varg Vikernes. Creepy, huh?

4. Mr. Bungle, “Everyone I Went to High School With Is Dead.” Even when Mike Patton isn’t breaking out his operatic banshee shrieks, Mr. Bungle’s spin on heavy rock is still pretty out there.

5. Goblin Cock, “Kegrah the Dragon Killer.” Goblin Cock is what happens when indie rock nerds try to do a stoner metal band—they shred, kinda, but in case the band name didn’t tip you off, the whole thing’s pretty tongue-in-cheek. The head indie rock nerd is this case is Rob Crow from Pinback. I also had to include a Goblin Cock track because I ripped off one of their totally awesome album covers as the lead image for this playlist. Hail Satan! And/or the well-endowed, Satan-like figure seen in most Goblin Cock artwork!

6. Powerglove, “Heffalumps and Woozles (Winnie the Pooh).” More nerd-metal, this time from a bunch of dudes from Boston who do heavy instrumental versions of songs from videogames and children’s cartoons. Yes, this really is based on the “Heffalumps” song from Winnie the Pooh—if you don’t believe me, here’s the original. Okay, it’s a loose interpretation, but still. Those Heffalumps will fuck your shit up.

7. Schwarzenator, “Predator.” This is slightly less nerdy than songs about Heffalumps and dragon killers, but not by much. Schwarzenator are one of three, count ‘em, three metal bands whose songs are all based on Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. I would include tracks from ArnoCorps and Austrian Death Machine, too, but one Ahh-nuld-themed song per playlist is really my limit. Get to da choppuh!

8. Bang Camaro, “Swallow the Razor.” Pop-metal with a “dude choir” of about 15 singers. If more ’80s hair metal bands had employed dude choirs, maybe we’d all still be listening to Skid Row and Whitesnake to this day. Oh, wait, some of you are still listening to Skid Row and Whitesnake? Well, then maybe you wouldn’t be doing it in your parents’ basement.

9. Dir En Grey, “Lotus.” Japanese prog-metal. Any questions? No? Moving on…

10. Common Grackle, “At the Grindcore Show.” You know how some metal albums have a nice little ballad or acoustic interlude before they return to their regularly scheduled face-melting? This is sorta that track. It also nicely sets up our next few grindcore(ish) tracks.

11. Cattle Decapitation, “Gestation of Smegma.” Technically, I guess these San Diego dudes aren’t true grindcore, but a related genre called goregrind. Whatever. All I know is I’m really glad most of their songs are less than one minute long.

12. The Locust, “We Have Reached an Official Verdict: Nobody Gives a Shit.” Another San Diego band (featuring ex-Cattle Decap drummer Gabe Serbian), The Locust also aren’t technically grindcore, but an even more distantly related genre called powerviolence. And you thought the dance music kids liked to split hairs over genre distinctions.

13. Iwrestledabearonce, “Alaskan Flounder Basket.” Again, not really grindcore…they’re more screamo/experimental…oh, fuck it. Just prepare to be ear-raped.

14. Horse the Band, “A Million Exploding Suns.” I had to throw these guys in here because they play yet another obscure/bizarre subgenre called “nintendocore,” which is basically hardcore + videogame music. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried, people!

15. GWAR, “Black and Huge.” This one needs no introduction. It’s fucking GWAR! Bow down, human scum.

16. Super Geek League, “Naked Machine.” These Seattle freaks call their very GWAR-like funk-thrash-punk sound “soul metal.” I just call it my soundtrack for breaking stuff.

17. Apocalyptica, “Enter Sandman.” Metallica, played by cellos. This shit cracks me up every time I hear it, but I’m pretty sure they’re serious. They’re from Finland, so it’s hard to tell.

Hope you dug this week’s playlist. Tune in next week (or the week after, we’re not really on any set schedule with these things), when my partner Andy returns with Music for Pussies.

Dir En Grey

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(Photo: angst-im-wald)

What’s up, weirdos? Sorry I’ve been letting Andy hog the site lately with his weak-ass indie pop hipster shit. I promise we will tilt the balance back in favor of punk, noise and metal in the weeks ahead. (Organic veggie instruments, dude? Really? But I digress.)

This week’s band was suggested by a reader named Kurtis, who reminded us that there’s more to Japan than Lady Gaga wannabes wearing headdresses made out of popcorn. Japan has also produced its fair share of pretty extreme and seriously awesome metal over the years, and Dir En Grey is about as extreme and awesome as it gets.

Dir En Grey have been around since the late ’90s and changed both their look and their sound several times over the years (Japanese bands seem to get bored with staying in one genre for too long–see also, ironically, Boredoms). They started out as a “visual kei” band, which basically meant hard rock with lots of elaborate costumes, crazy visuals and music videos that were a mix of anime, goth and cyberpunk. They’ve since toned down their image a bit (hence the biker gang look seen above, circa 2007), but their music has, if anything, gotten weirder. Their latest album, Dum Spiro Spero, kind of sounds like Tool meets My Chemical Romance meets Queensryche meets Napalm Death: alt-metal, screamo, grindcore and prog rock all fighting it out like superheroes in a Japanese action comic, with lead singer Kyo’s crazy vocals (dude can death-growl with the best of them, then unleash an operatic falsetto close to Mike Patton’s) leading the way.

But where Dir En Grey’s weirdness really shines is in their videos, some of which are disturbing enough to make Rob Zombie sleep with the light on. You know how the original Ring was 10 times scarier than pretty much any American horror movie ever? Well, your average Dir En Grey clip makes Marilyn Manson look like Mr. Rogers. Warning: You may need to increase your Xanax dosage after viewing this.

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Rammstein

Like a lot of Americans, I never heard of Rammstein until they were all over the news as one of the favorite bands of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, a.k.a. the kids who shot up Columbine High School in 1999. A yearbook photo even surfaced of Harris wearing a Rammstein T-shirt. Apparently, this German industrial band was the Embodiment of Pure Evil and had somehow influenced (along with Marilyn Manson and KMFDM) these impressionable Colorado kids to join the “Trenchcoat Mafia” and go on one of the most horrific shooting sprees in U.S. history. At least that was what the hyperbolic, ham-brained, frothing-at-the-mouth morons who pass for mainstream media in this country would have had you believe. (Sorry, Rest of the World. We’re not all as idiotic as Fox News, I swear.)

Since then, I’ve come to learn that while yes, Rammstein can be a little dark, they aren’t in the habit of encouraging their fans to go on shooting rampages. They’re pretty much just your average metal/industrial band, except they sing everything in German–which, to a certain conservative strain of Middle America, automatically makes everything they do terrifying. Not because they’re German, per se–in Middle America, all foreign languages are terrifying. We Americans aren’t so good with the whole foreign language thing. It’s why when we travel abroad, we yell at your waiters in slow, over-enunciated English.

I’ve also come to learn that, actually, there’s nothing “average” about Rammstein’s version of brutal, Teutonic hard rock. Their music and their stage shows tend to be bigger, louder and more bombastic than pretty much all of their peers, in Germany (where the term “Neue Deutsche Härte”–”New German Hardness”–was coined to describe bands like Rammstein and Oomph!) and elsewhere. The word “Wagnerian” gets used to describe them a lot. Their shows feature over-the-top props like giant, foam-shooting penises and pyro–lots of pyro. Lead singer Till Lindemann is actually a certified pyrotechnician, which must come in handy when the band does stuff like this.

But the coolest thing about Rammstein–and the thing that really earns them an entry here on TWBITW–is that they’re funny. This sometimes seems to get lost in translation, for obvious reasons–but then again, can anyone really watch their “Amerika” video and not get the joke? Judging from the YouTube comments, apparently the answer is “yes.” Oh, my fellow Americans. Y’all need to lighten up.

Fortunately, for the irony-challenged among us, Rammstein just released a new video to promote Made In Germany 1995-2011, their first greatest-hits album. (Yes, they have hits. They’ve sold over 15 million records worldwide, in fact. So color us clueless for having never heard of them prior to Columbine.) It’s for a new song called “Mein Land,” it was directed by Jonas Åkerlund (whose other credits include Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” and the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up”) and it’s awesome. It’s a German industrial beach party! (Stay with it till the 3:33 mark; that’s when it takes a real turn for the, uh, Härte.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Extreme Turbo Smash

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Well, weirdlings, our Submit & Vote page has struck again. It took us awhile, but we finally got around to tallying up the votes and Denver furrycore band (You like that? “Furrycore”? We just made that up. TM!) Extreme Turbo Smash has officially been deemed weird by you, our cracked out readers. Nice one, Extreme Turbo Smash!

We don’t know a lot about these guys, but we don’t really have to: This is one of those instant “get it” bands that doesn’t really require a lot of explaining. It’s a bunch of dudes (at least we think they’re dudes…come to think of it, you really can’t tell) dressed up in furry animal suits, playing the most balls-out metal this side of Megadeth. The whole thing started as a joke, as one of the band members admitted to us…but they’re fast becoming one of the most popular live acts in Colorado, and you can see why. It’s like someone hired the guys from Anthrax to play a five year old’s birthday party. It’s also pretty impressive stuff on a purely technical level—I mean, can that one guy in the giant penguin head even see what he’s playing? Or wait, maybe it’s a crow head. Either way, he kinda shreds.

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