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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:
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)
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Well, kids, we really missed the boat on this one. A whole bunch of you out there in Weirdo Land have been suggesting almost since we started this blog that we write about Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and we were always like, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll get around to it.” And we blew it off, and blew it off, and now Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is no more. Last week we got an email announcing SGM’s final L.A. show this past Friday, and final San Francisco shows yesterday. “As it turns out,” read the email, “we are being replaced.”
For those of y’all not familiar: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is basically what happens when a bunch of SF art freaks get together and decide to make Dadaist-inspired prog-metal on a combination of traditional and homemade instruments. They were started in 1999 by Dan Rathbun and Nils Frykdahl, who used to be in a band called Idiot Flesh, and also featured members of Tin Hat Trio, Skeleton Key and a dance company called InkBoat. To give you an idea of how friggin weird these guys were, here are the names of some of their other projects: Vacuum Tree Head, Immersion Composition Society, Thinking Plague and Moe!kestra. Wonder which one is “replacing” them?
Supposedly the band was named after an actual museum that burned down in 1916, one founded by a futurist and a “black mathematician” and one that did not allow human visitors. Among the many odd instruments featured in their shows were something called a sledgehammer dulcimer and something else called a “popping turtle.” One of their songs, “Helpless Corpses Enactment,” features lyrics based on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; another, “FC: The Freedom Club,” uses texts from the Unabomber. It’s all very intellectual stuff, even if it’s being delivered by guys in topknots and what kinda look like neo-pagan prom dresses.
Although SGM have sadly played their last gig, we supposedly haven’t heard the last from them. The same email that announced the last shows also promised some new studio material, a short film and a live DVD compiled of performances from the past six years. So maybe they haven’t been totally replaced after all.
Anyway, here’s their totally bitchin’ and (we think) mostly tongue-in-cheek ode to Satan (or Lucifer, if you wanna get all techincal), “A Hymn to the Morning Star.” Never has pure evil looked so silly.
Links:
- Sleepytime Gorilla Museum official site
- Sleepytime Gorilla Museum on MySpace
- Charming Hostess official site (band featuring Dan Rathbun and Nils Frykdahl)
- Faun Fables (band featuring Nils Frykdahl)
- Polymorph Recording Studios (Rathbun’s audio house)
