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Dir En Grey
(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.
Links:
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.)
Links:
- Rammstein official site
- Rammstein on MySpace
- Rammstein on YouTube
- Herzeleid.com (fan site)
- RammsteinNicCage.com (fan site)
- Affenknecht (fan site)
Loutallica (Lou Reed & Metallica)
We’re not usually big bandwagon-jumpers around here. Show us a bandwagon and we tend to run the other way as fast our wobbly legs can carry us. But with this whole “Loutallica” thing, we cannot sit idly by while the rest of Ye Olde Blogosphere whips up a good-old fashioned shitstorm over how unbelievably, monumentally terrible it is. We gotta get on in there and start freaking the fuck out with the rest of them.
So in case you weren’t sure: Yes, we share the near-universal opinion that Lou Reed and Metallica’s much hyped Lulu–in addition to being quite possibly the weirdest album of the year–is a trainwreck of epic, biblical proportions. If this album was a movie, it would be Howard the Duck. If it was a car, it would a lime-green Pinto with vinyl seats. If it was a rapper, it would be Vanilla Ice, only if he had never done “Ice Ice Baby.” If it was a football team, it would be the 2008 Detroit Lions. If it was something you could buy out of a vending machine, it would be New Coke. No wait…it would be Diet New Coke. Did they even make Diet New Coke? If they did, it would have sucked only slightly more than Lulu.
To be fair, we should have seen this coming. These are the guys that gave us St. Anger and Metal Machine Music, after all. Lou Reed has a penchant for pretentious noise that dates all the way back to his Velvet Underground days–just try to listen to all nine minutes of “Murder Mystery” and feel anything other than proud of yourself for slogging all the way through it. And Metallica’s issues, both musical and emotional, have been well-documented. Put them together, and a perfect storm of bombastitude was probably the inevitable result.
But still…it could have been so sweet. “Sweet Jane” + “Enter Sandman”? Sign us up. But Reed and Hetfield and co. have pretty clearly lost all interest in making those kinds of records at this point in their respective careers…or they’ve forgotten how to. Either way, this whole project was a moonshot that came up well short.
The only good thing that’s come out of Lulu? An awesome new “I Am the Table” internet meme. People are getting more creative online with that shit than Lou and ‘Tallica got with their entire album. (If you have no idea what “I Am the Table” means…well, count yourself lucky, or listen to the track below if you want in on the joke.)
Anyway…if you’re one of the five people who still haven’t heard this shit, feast your ears. And if you’re one of the zero people who want to hear the whole thing (including a 19-minute track called “Junior Dad”…you’ve been warned), it’s all streaming over on the Loutallica site.
Links:
- Lou Reed & Metallica official site
- Metallica official site
- Lou Reed official site
- Lou Reed/Metallica YouTube channel
- Chuck Klosterman on Lulu (best thing we’ve read on the subject)
Haunted Garage
Have you ever wondered what the missing link is between the Misfits and GWAR? Us neither, but a reader named Jeremy just found it for us and posted it on our Facebook page (and hey, while we’re on the subject, go over to Facebook and “Like” us, will ya? I know, it’s annoying, but you never know…maybe if you do it, we’ll give you a pony). The band is called Haunted Garage and they appear to have taken the fine art of covering your audience in fake blood and real slime to heights that would probably leave Oderus Urungus clutching his codpiece in a fetal position. Okay, maybe not, but they were pretty fucking gross, is what I’m saying.
Haunted Garage were part of the L.A. underground rock scene from around 1985 until 1992, although they’ve done a handful of reunion shows in the years since. They only released one album as far as we can tell, a lost nugget from 1990 called Possession Park, although they also did the soundtracks for a lot of horror and sci-fi B-movies like Nightmare Sisters and The Dead Hate the Living!
The band was started by a B-movie actor and screenwriter named Michael Sonye. Among the credits on his IMDb page: Dorm of the Dead, Terrors From the Clit, Hollywood Chainsaw Bartenders and of course the immortal Troma classic Surf Nazis Must Die, which I’m pretty sure I watched in a bonghit haze back in high school and even then thought, “Wow, this sucks.” For Haunted Garage, Sonye made up an alter ego named Dukey Flyswatter who’s sort of a combination of Iggy Pop, Glenn Danzig and Dr. Frank N. Furter. The band apparently started out playing cover versions of songs from classic horror film soundtracks, but eventually started coming up with original tunes with titles like “Torture Dungeon” and “Brain in a Jar.” Their sound is usually described as horror punk, although Dukey also used the term “splatter punk,” which is a lot more evocative, don’t ya think?
Haunted Garage shows were highly theatrical and sometimes destructive affairs. A bio on the band’s MySpace page claims that their final show, at a long-gone Hollywood dive called the Coconut Teaser, ended with the crowd tearing down the sprinkler system and girls getting their tops ripped off. Up onstage, most of the blood, gore and mayhem was faked, but sometimes the band could cross over into full-on freakshow territory. Dukey, for example, is famous for attaching mousetraps to his face. (And if you clicked on that link, I apologize. That’s gonna be a tough image to shake, huh?)
There’s a cool “video profile” of Haunted Garage on YouTube, which also introduces such other memorable band members as their drag queen guitarist, Gaby Godhead, their rat-loving drummer, Stiff Slug, and the “gore-gore girls,” who provided the eye candy. But the video that we felt would give y’all the best taste of Haunted Garage in all their gory glory was the one below, featuring a sort of necrophiliac love song called “Dead and Gone.” Stay with it till around the 2:30 mark, when it really takes a turn for the freaky.
Links:
- Haunted Garage on MySpace
- Dukey Flyswatter on MySpace
- Gaby Godhead “My Awesome Crap” video (just because it is, indeed, awesome)
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 to the fact that Primus’ music, for all its obvious influences–Frank Zappa, King Crimson, the Residents, Rush–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)
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)
Extreme Turbo Smash
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 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.
Links:
Metalachi
Today’s band was suggested by Lulie, one of our Facebook fans. (Yeah, we have a Facebook page…what, you haven’t liked us yet? Well, what the fuck are you waiting for?) They’re a mariachi metal band, which might make them the most quintessentially L.A. band of all time. Sunset Strip meets East L.A., baby! If this taco truck’s a-rockin, don’t come…okay, we’ll stop.
Anyhoo, Metalachi claim to be a group of five identical twin…no, wait, not twin. What’s the word? Quinteplet? Sorry, I’m writing this drunk. Five identical born at the same time brothers who were born south of the border and snuck into our fair land to discover…well, apparently they discovered Black Sabbath, who are actually British, but let’s not get all technical here. The point is that they discovered metal and proceeded to apply their god-given mariachi skills to the fine art of banging heads. With trumpets, violins and whatever that one really big guitar is called. And one dude who dresses up like GWAR.
Their YouTube channel has a bunch of videos, and they’re all pretty cool in their own way. (The violinist really shreds on “Master of Puppets.”) But of all their covers, the one that sounds the most like an actual mariachi song is probably “Crazy Train.” Who knew?
P.S. If you like Metalachi, may we suggest also checking out Beatallica (Metallica/Beatles cover band), Tragedy (Bee Gees metal cover band) and Schwarzenator (Arnold Schwarzenegger metal tribute band). What is it about metal that attracts so many goofballs?
Links:
Attila
Today’s band existed only briefly back around 1970 and as you can see from the above album cover, they definitely qualify as among the weirder acts of their time. Besides dressing up like Medieval Times employees and hanging out in meat lockers, they also played a very early, very primitive style of hard rock that featured no guitars, just organ and drums. It was like a couple of dudes heard Deep Purple’s “Hush” when they were really stoned and were all, “You know what would be heavy? Doing that shit with no fucking guitars!” And after less than a year together, even they finally realized this was a terrible idea and broke up.
But here’s the kicker: see that dude on the right? That’s Billy fucking Joel. Yes, Attila was one of Billy Joel’s first bands, before he finally wised up and launched his solo career. Listen to the track below and keep telling yourself that this is the same guy who went on to do “New York State of Mind” and “Just the Way You Are.” Kind of hurts your head, doesn’t it? Or maybe that’s just Attila’s music. Gotta admit, they were actually pretty heavy for a band with no guitars. Not very good, but heavy.
Links:
- Attila on MySpace (fan site)
- Attila on Wikipedia
Dwarr
A long time ago, back before bands could mix entire albums with a secondhand Macbook and a pirated copy of Pro Tools, a guitar-toting loner from South Carolina named Duane Warr set out to make the heaviest heavy metal album ever, more or less by himself. The fruit of his labor was a 1985 (or maybe 1984?) album called Starting Over that didn’t really sound all that much like metal, but definitely sounded like nothing else before it and not much since. Part Sabbath and (probably by accident) part Residents, Starting Over and an even more amazing 1986 album called Animals were pretty much ignored at the time of their release but have since become cult classics among fans of weirdo, lo-fi stoner rock.
Warr dropped off the face of the earth for about 15 years–supposedly after becoming a Born Again Christian and renouncing all his old music. But he surprised everyone by resurfacing in 2000 with a third album, Holy One, and even followed that up with a fourth LP, Times of Terror, in 2003. Seems like he’s still a bit of a recluse though: The guy who posted the only original Dwarr video we could find (seen below), added a comment on YouTube noting that “I used to run the Dwarr MySpace page, but unfortunately I’ve been out of touch with Duane for a long time now. There are even more Dwarr videos, but I only had permission to post this one.” And the write-up for the 2010 reissue of Animals on Drag City Records gives no biographical background at all, only this awesome quote from Duane himself:
“I was working 12 hour shifts down at the sweat factory. One day, I was having a bad day and had a problem with one of the older guys. All of a sudden he pulled his packing knife out on me. I felt a rage running up through me and went running at him. He put the knife away very quickly. That night I had the dream for the title song ANIMALS. In the dream, I ate the human flesh, I crushed the human bone, I was an animal.”
It’s possible that is all just an elaborate put-on and Duane Warr’s mysterious backstory is all just part of his shtick. Or it’s possible that he just doesn’t want the world to know that he’s actually this guy. But we’re pretty sure he’s just a bonafide wackjob. And even though he’s kind of a terrible musician, he totally fucking rules. (P.S. The video has a weird, sorta pointless intro…give it about 30 seconds, it gets good, trust us.)
Links:
- Dwarr on MySpace
- Dwarr on Drag City Records
- Dwarr entry on Encyclopaedia Metallum (with links to hear all of Starting Over and Animals)
