Blog Archives
Iwrestledabearonce announce new tour dates
After spending much of the past year opening for bands named after classic American novels (Of Mice and Men, As I Lay Dying…maybe next they could open for The Dangerous Summer?), it’s about time those crazy kids in Iwrestledabearonce finally had some headlining shows of their own. So here they are! It’s the official IWABO “Road to Metal Fest” tour, coming soon to a landlocked city near you:
“Road To Metal Fest” Tour
4/16 – Oklahoma City, OK @ Conservatory
4/17 – Memphis, TN @ New Daisy Theater
4/18 – Knoxville, TN @ Valarium
4/20 – Springfield, VA @ Empire
4/21 – Worcester, MA @ The Palladium – New England Metal and Hardcore Festival
4/23 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Altar Bar
4/24 – Evansville, IN @ Boney Junes
4/25 – Bloomington, IL @ The Castle Theater
4/26 – Des Moines, IA @ Vaudeville Mews
4/27 – Iowa City, IA @ Blue Moose
4/29 – Denver, CO @ Marquis Theatre
4/30 – Albuquerque, NM @ Launchpad
5/01 – Flagstaff, AZ @ Cinnabar
We’ll play this post out with the video for “You Know That Ain’t Them Dogs’ Real Voices” off IWABO’s latest album, Ruining It for Everybody, available now online and wherever they still sell CDs that don’t suck. Best. Children’s. Party. Ever.
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)
Sunn O)))
Today’s weird band was suggested by a reader named Jordan. Sup, Jordan? Glad you’re digging the site.
The band is called Sunn O))) (that’s a capital letter O, not a zero, in case you were wondering) and they’re a drone metal band made up of two dudes from Seattle, Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, plus various guest vocalists and other collaborators. What is drone metal, you ask? Well, imagine heavy metal stripped off all beats and slowed down until it sounds like the world’s slowest demon army coming to either bludgeon you into paste or slowly bore you to death. It’s not for everyone, is what we’re saying. But Sunn O)))’s version has its pluses.
For one thing, there’s the band live act, which involves volume and smoke machines cranked up to 11 and band members lurking about the stage in long black robes like a bunch of malevolent metal druids. And since playing drone metal doesn’t really require much in the way of technical shredding, there’s also a lot of guitars-and-fists-up pose-striking. Sometimes, it looks like they’re barely playing their guitars at all–they just hit one chord and then stand there looking all “Kneel before your Lord and Master” while those enormous Marshall stacks do all the work. There’s something very Spinal Tap about it, even though the music is so abstract it’s almost not even music anymore–it’s just a bunch of bowel-loosening tones.
In general, Sunn O))) is not a band for people with short attention spans. Music that moves this slowly takes awhile to get where it’s going–a lot of Sunn O))) tracks are over 20 minutes long. A lot of fans and critics seemed to think their last album, Monoliths and Dimensions, was downright accessible by Sunn O))) standards–and the shortest track on that set is nine minutes long and called “Big Church (Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért).” So you won’t be hearing them at the mall anytime soon.
Sunn O))) live shows are by all accounts pretty bizarre affairs, but they don’t render real well in video form–YouTube can’t capture the sheer visceral punch of all that noise, and your average FlipCam is screwed when the smoke machines get cranking. So instead, we’ll leave you with a track called “My Wall,” which features some spoken-word ranting from professional weirdo/occultist Julian Cope. Apparently that’s druidic poetry he’s reciting. Again, very Spinal Tap. Stonehenge!
(P.S. Random bonus factoid about Sun O))): They’ve performed with Madonna. No, we’re not making this up.)
Links:
- Sunn O))) on MySpace
- Sunn O))) on Southern Lord Records (label website)
- Sunn O)))/Boris – “Altar” (official site for collaborative album with Japanese metal band)
- Ideologic (Stephen O’Malley official 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)
Hank3
It’s gotta suck being the musician kid of a famous musician. On the one hand, you want to carve out your own identity for yourself; on the other hand, how you sing and how you play and even how your write songs is embedded in your DNA. Dhani Harrison can’t help sounding like his dad George no matter how much Radiohead he listens to and how many members of Wu-Tang Clan he collaborates with. Harper Simon, son of Paul, toiled in obscurity on various unsuccessful musical projects until his late thirties, when he finally said “Fuck it” and made a Simon & Garfunkel record. Heredity is destiny, or something like that.
So it’s kind of amazing that a guy like Hank3 exists. Hank3 is better known as Hank Williams III, grandson of the great Hank Williams and son of the not-so-great Hank Williams, Jr., that dude who sings the Monday Night Football theme. Any halfway sane offspring of that musical legacy would probably be on his third tour of duty with Celebrity Rehab by now. But happily, Hank3 is just the right kind of nuts to live it all down and do his own thing.
That thing, for years now, has been playing back-to-back sets every night of pickin’ and grinnin’ traditional, honky-tonk country, followed by a rip-your-face-off onslaught of punk, psychobilly and speed metal. Yes, Hank3 somehow manages to have it both ways. He honors the family legacy and extends an upraised middle finger to it, every night.
Because of the schizophrenic nature of his music, Hank3′s always been more than a little weird. But he really went off the deep end just recently with the release of 3 Bar Ranch Cattle Callin’, one of four different albums (well, technically three, because one was a double LP) he released on the same day earlier this month.
The other albums are all pretty much par for the Hank3 course. Ghost to a Ghost/Guttertown is a mix of trad country, the country/punk hybrid sound he calls “hellbilly,” and Hank’s swampy, spooky version of Cajun music. Attention Deficit Domination is a straight metal record, although it’s slower and sludgier than fans of Hank’s punk/metal band Assjack might expect.
Then there’s 3 Bar Ranch, which is a critter of a different color entirely. It’s an entire album’s worth of cattle auctioneers accompanied by speed metal. Hank3 calls it “cattlecore.” We call it…well, let’s just say the man famous for putting the “dick in Dixie” and the “cunt in country” really outdid himself this time.
Links:
Powerglove
God, metalheads are such dorks. The latest proof of that statement comes from Boston, Mass. (home of another of our favorite dorky metal bands, Bang Camaro) in the form of Powerglove, an instrumental metal quartet who specialize in doing headbanging covers of videogame theme songs. Although for their latest album, Saturday Morning Apocalypse, they branched out into the slightly less 8-bit world of Saturday morning cartoon soundtracks. Don’t choke on your Froot Loops, kids!
In the studio, Powerglove’s sound actually makes so much sense that it’s hard to even categorize them as weird. The theme music for things like The Simpsons and Power Rangers actually sounds pretty OK done as melodramatic speed metal. It’s really their live show where things start to get a little WTF. Two of the guys are in sort of half-KISS drag, but another one’s sitting in a chair like they just wheeled him in from a marathon coding session and stuck a guitar in his lap. Or maybe he’s in a wheelchair? Does anyone know? Were we just unintentionally offensive to the disabled community? Wouldn’t be the first time. Wait, here the same dude is standing up, at another gig eight months earlier. Did he sprain an ankle? The mystery deepens. (Also, why are both shows in Montreal? Do French-Canadians have some weird vintage videogame fetish we don’t know about?)
Anyhow, Powerglove just released their crowning achievement in weirdness: They shot a video for their cover of the “Batman” cartoon theme music in which they cast themselves as characters in their own videogame. “I programmed several video game fight scenarios with the band as playable characters and recorded takes of me playing through the mini games,” guitarist Chris Marchiel explains in a press release. Like I said…dorks!
Links:
- Powerglove official site
- Powerglove’s YouTube channel
- Powerglove on Facebook
- Powerglove on MySpace (for now)
Super Geek League
(Photo by Geoffrey Gribbin: www.bipolarimages.com)
Well, this is kinda fun. Super Geek League calls their music “soul metal” and their stage show a “sci fi punk circus” complete with dancing girls, crazy outfits, gnomes, strippers dressed up like Hindu goddesses, confetti cannons, pillow fight mosh pits (don’t ask me, I’m just quoting from their press kit), and occasionally things like Twinkies and dead fish getting tossed at the audience. In fact, they nearly got kicked off the Warped Tour because of the cleanup required after a typical SGL set. And if you’re extreme enough to piss off the Warped Tour people, you must be doing something right.
We haven’t been able to find out much else about these guys, except that they’re from Seattle, they have an album coming out later this month (called, as coincidence would have it, Soul Metal) and their ringleader calls himself Floyd McFeely. There’s more about the band in this article, but frankly the writing was so bad it made my head hurt. We’ll give the writer the benefit of the doubt though–after trying to interview these guys, I might lose my ability to form sentences, too.
Wait, this is a first: As I was writing this, Floyd McFeely emailed me. Dude’s psychic. Either that or he just noticed that we started following him on Twitter. Either way, coincidink.
He writes: “We have already been named “Best Masked Bands” so mine [sic] as well be one of the WEIRDEST bands.” Amen, brother.
Floyd also forwarded us a copy of the band’s official press kit, which is a good thing because we were really have a hard time describing these guys. But here you go, chew on this, from the Erotic Exotic Ball: “If System of a Down, Primus and Insane Clown Posse gangbanged Macy Gray, Super Geek League would undoubtedly be their spunky demon offspring.” Yeah that about sums it up.
But hey, you haven’t even been paying attention since I mentioned something about strippers dressed up like Hindu goddesses, have you? Well, get ready to burn in whatever the Hindu equivalent of Hell is, because you’re about to see what I mean.
Links:
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:
Tool
Greetings and salutations, weirdlings. It’s been a looooong time since we’ve posted anything here and for that, Jake and I sincerely apologize. You see, when we got to our 100th post (yes, this is our 100th post) and our 100th weird band, we had some kind of weird existential crisis over why we started this whole fucking blog in the first place. “We’ve done 100 bands already, and we’re still not famous? Why go on?” we thought. Followed immediately by: “We’ve only done 100 bands? We’ve been at this for nearly two fucking years. Mojo Nixon has probably written 100 songs in that time. Christ, we suck.”
We also agonized over who our 100th band should be. We decided it should be a biggie and even used that stupid new Facebook “Questions” feature to ask you guys to help us figure out which biggie it should be. (And, like, six of you voted…which further deepened our “Why are we even doing this?” existential crisis.) Tool? Primus? Butthole Surfers? Worthy candidates all…but then we found ourselves thinking, “Really? The world needs us to point out that Tool is weird? Fucking duh!” And bam, more existential crisis. And more drinking. (Well, Jake drank. I started mowing down pints of Ben & Jerry’s. It was a dark time.)
Finally, we said “Fuck it. We’ve come this far. Why stop now?” So today, at long last, Jake and I are emerging from our two-month booze-and-butterfat-fueled pity party to tell the world that, yes, Tool is one weird fucking band.
Are we preaching to the choir on this one? Well, yes. But we’re completists and if any band ever deserved a spot on our Weird List, it’s these guys. Really, any band featuring Maynard James Keenan should probably wind up here sooner or later. That guy is a freak. We hear he makes good wine though.
More than Keenan, though, what really sets Tool apart from their prog-metal brethren is their videos. Created mainly by guitarist Adam Jones, they use lots of stop motion animation and creepy visual effects to create some of the most disturbing imagery ever presented by an MTV Veejay. It’s hard to pick just one as their weirdest, but “Stinkfist” has to be high on the list. So enjoy…and we promise we’ll be back soon with more weird bands, including maybe even a few you haven’t already heard of.
Links:
- Tool official site
- Tool Army (fan club site – login required)
- The Tool Page (fan site)
- Dissectional (Tool art site)
