So yesterday someone named Brad Cow Dizease (his actual name, it turns out—what are the odds?) sent us a link to a video by a fellow from Pittsburgh called Weird Paul Petroskey—or, to use his full YouTube handle, Original Vlogger 80’s Weird Paul Petroskey. Apparently he decided to start calling himself the “Original Vlogger” when he unearthed a VHS tape of himself back in 1984 doing a video review of a McDonald’s breakfast that is uncannily similar in style and structure to the awkward vlogger fast food reviews of today. It’s almost like he somehow time traveled back to 1984 and coached his younger self through the whole thing just so he could post it on YouTube 28 years later. But I digress.
Anyway, it turns out Weird Paul is a semi-famous outsider musician (by outsider musician standards) who’s been making music since the late ’80s. We’re sure he’ll be a Weird Band of the Week eventually, but in the meantime, I couldn’t resist posting this “We Love Computers” clip now, because having been the proud owner of a Commodore 64 in the ’80s, it gave me so many flashbacks I thought maybe I was time traveling back to 1984. The syntax errors! The clunky floppy disc drives! Zork! Man, we all thought we were living in the future.
To learn more about Weird Paul and his music, check out his website.
Merrill Garbus releases her third tUnE-yArDs album, Nikki Nack, on May 6th, but you can hear the whole thing now over on NPR.com. Does having your album streamed on NPR automatically make you less weird? Probably, but Merrill had weirdness to spare, so we’ll give her a pass.
Nikki Nack is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from tUnE-yArDs: lots of school-yard chant vocals, simple but syncopated beats and basslines, sparse instrumentation that sounds like it was recorded inside a mason jar. It’s a bit cleaner and more percussive than 2011’s w h o k i l l, and occasionally even sounds like Garbus’ take on modern, high-octane pop-R&B, like on the epic “Real Thing.” But it’s still one of more idiosyncratic things you’ll hear get any mainstream media attention this year.
You can pre-order Nikki Nack for a mere $10 from Amazon.com. Now let’s play this post out with tUnE-yArDs’ Pee-wee’s Playhouse-inspired video for “Water Fountain,” shall we?
Moogfest starts tonight, so we’re going to wrap our random walk through some of their weirdest bands with our sixth and final Moogfest-themed Weird of the Day post. It’s Wolf Eyes, motherfuckers!
Wolf Eyes’ nightmarish mix of avant-garde noise, drone and post-industrial doom rock hasn’t gotten any less aggressive or unsettling, even as the band has approached something like mainstream status with releases on Sub Pop Records and tours with the likes of Andrew W.K. and Sonic Youth. Their latest album, No Answer: Lower Floors, came out last year and is, according to the Moogfest website, something like their 150th release. Here’s the video for opening track “Choking Flys,” which I believe doubles as a tutorial for how to gather firewood in post-apocalyptic (i.e. today’s) Detroit, Michigan.
Wolf Eyes play Moogfest on Thursday, Apr. 24th, as part of the festival’s most must-see lineup for fans of weirdness: Also playing the New Earth main room that night are electronic noise legends Black Dice, synth-jam master Dan Deacon and avant-electro oddballs YACHT. For more info, visit the Moogfest official site.
If you’re not godless heathens like Jake and me, you’re probably celebrating the Resurrection of Our Lord & Savior this weekend by painting some hard-boiled eggs and biting the heads off chocolate rabbits. But even if you don’t celebrate Easter, you’re sure to enjoy Miss Von Trapp‘s new ode to the season, “Taxidermy Chocolate Bunny (Oh dear what can the matter be).” In fact, the less you give a shit about Easter, the more likely you are to enjoy it. Unless you hate ukuleles. Then you’re screwed.
Miss Von T. also has quite a few shows coming up this summer. If you live in England and anything steampunk-related is happening near you, chances are she’ll be there. Do check her out, won’t you?
23-26 May – Plymouth – Volksfest Cabaret Tent 2014 14 June – Devon – The Carnivale of the Peculiar 20-22 June – Bristol – Brass Brunel Steampunk Convention 25 June – Plymouth – Pennycomequick Arts present ‘Black Books’ 5 July – St. Austell – Steampunk Ball, The Market House 14-18 Aug. – Kettering – Alt-Fest: The Steampunk Experience (hosted by our friends BB Blackdog) 27 Sept. – Exeter – Steampunk Cabaret with Professor Elemental, The Tobacco House 11 Oct. – Exeter – Rogues Gallery: A Neo-Vaudeville Night of Delights
Those of you who follow us chattering classes and our continued hand-wringing over technology might have noticed a lot of us bitching lately about Facebook. You might have heard us chatterers throwing around terms like “organic reach” and “filtered feeds” and “social media extortion.” I just wrote a very long post explaining all this shit, but then I decided to delete it because none of it is really all that interesting. If you want all the gory details, read this. Or better yet, watch this video.
Bottom line, here’s what’s happening: If you’ve “Liked” our Facebook page, you now have only about a 7% chance of seeing any of our Facebook posts. This is because Facebook has decided that content from pages you’ve liked is somehow less relevant or “spammier” than posts from your friends.
So if you like our posts and want to keep seeing them, there are a couple of things you can do:
1. Follow us on something other than Facebook. Options here include:
The “Follow” feature on WordPress (only works if you have a WordPress account…but it only takes about two seconds to create one)
Twitter (for now, this is the only other way to get our awesome #WeirdoftheDay posts…but thanks to Facebook’s nefarious ways, we’re considering posting them on the blog, as well, where more folks can actually see them)
2. Like or, better yet, share our Facebook posts. You might have to hit our page directly to see our posts in the first place, but the more “Likes” and “Shares” they get, the more they’ll actually start to appear in our other readers’ news feeds.
We will, of course, continue to strive to bring you content that’s actually worth liking and sharing and whatnot. If we start sucking, we deserve to have our posts buried. Who knows, maybe that’s what’s already been happening. But I don’t think so. I just think Facebook is being a dick.
As always, Jake and I humbly thank you for reading. More weirdness coming your way very soon.
Thank Christ for Google Translator, because otherwise I would have nothing to tell you about this week’s band. They’re a “performance collective” from Germany…and I guess “performance collective” is German for “crazy art freaks making deliberately stupid techno” because that’s what these guys do. They make bad techno and sing over it like a bunch of people pretending to be retarded, as if to say, “Look how retarded this music is!”
Then they shoot videos that are even weirder and dumber than the music. In this one, a bunch of white girls strut around trying to look hard while eating candy bars in front of a gas station. In this one, a nerdy guy masturbates slowly and tenderly to a bad painting. In this one, two of the collective’s members, Tutenchamun and Maike Schönfeld, just dance like idiots in various public places.
They seem to release a new video every month or so. In their latest one, released just last week, a girl dances on a chair for four minutes while a fat biker dude flips off the camera and opens his mail. I know that sounds incredibly stupid, and it is, but the video is fucking great. Trying to describe a HGich.T video is like trying to explain to your wife that the funniest thing you’ve ever seen in your life was when your best friend in college spontaneously moonwalked across an entire frathouse basement because he was trying not to puke on his shoes. It was the funniest thing you’ve ever seen but…you just had to see it.
One of the best things about binge-watching HGich.T videos is all the recurring characters you can follow. There’s the obvious star of the show, Tutenchamun, who’s like a German parody of that douchebag from The Prodigy, if said douchebag had forgotten to take off his yellow safety vest after ditching his picking-up-trash-by-the-highway community service stint. There’s Dr. Diamond, who seems to spend a lot of time hanging out in his room and having arguments with his mother. There’s Pussy Cat Diddel, who wears cat mouse makeup. And of course there’s my personal favorite, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, aka Opa16, the group’s creepy old man in residence. I have a soft spot for creepy old men, being only a few years away from becoming one myself.
The video they’re most famous for is “Tutenchamun,” sometimes mistakenly referred to as “Goa Goa MPU” (we had this totally backwards, and also failed to realize that Diddel was supposed to be a mouse, until reader Iesus set us straight—thanks, Iesus!). In it, Tutenchamun rides around with Maike on a motorbike with broken shocks and tells a long, increasingly surreal story about getting pulled over by a cop, played by the least cop-like man in all of Germany, Dr. Diamond. Like all HGich.T videos, it’s incredibly stupid and you might not be able to stop watching.
So I think we can all agree that from here on out, anytime anyone tries to tell a long, rambling story about how fucking hard they partied last night, we’re going to say “Ja?” every five seconds in a bored monotone until they stop. Right? Ja?
As great as “Goa Goa MPU” is, the HGich.T clip that’s my favorite so far…and I say “so far” because they have like 60 some odd videos and I never quite got baked enough to watch every single one…is “die letzten titten von betlehem.” This one has everything: Drugs, vandalism, jailbait, wasteful use of toilet paper, an oddly creepy sequence in which a dude terrorizes a girl with a Sharpie. It’s like a German rave meets a scared-straight after-school special meets a Fellini film. Plus the track fucking goes off.
So anyway…next time I go out dancing, I really hope the DJ plays a HGich.T track so I can storm into the ladies’ bathroom and do my best Tutenchamun impersonation. I am so getting laid with that action.
With their whole Mighty Morphin Power Ramones shtick, I didn’t think Peelander-Z could get any more awesome. Then last year, they transformed from a punk band and into a metal band and bam! More awesomeness. I’ll never underestimate you again, Peelander-Z.
You can see the new hesher-friendly incarnation of Peelander in action starting next month, when they head out on a U.S. tour that is sure to leave a lot of sore necks and torn fishnets in its wake.
Peelander-Z On Tour:
03/08 Savannah, GA @ Club One (Savannah Stopover Festival)
03/18 Houston, TX @ Fitzgerald’s Upstairs
03/19 New Orleans, LA @ One Eyed Jacks
03/20 Birmingham, AL @ The Bottletree Cafe
03/21 Athens, GA @ 40 Watt
03/22 Knoxville, TN @ The Bowery
03/24 Atlanta, GA @ The Drunken Unicorn
03/25 Chattanooga, TN @ JJ’s Bohemia
03/28 St. Louis, MO @ The Demo
03/29 Springfield, MO @ Outland Ballroom
03/30 Tulsa, OK @ Mercury Lounge
04/01 Norman, OK @ Opolis
04/03 Lincoln, NE @ Knickerbockers
04/05 Kansas City, MO @ Middle Of The Map Fest
04/09 Denver, CO @ Marquis Theater
04/15 San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar
04/16 West Hollywood, CA @ The Roxy Theatre
04/17 San Francisco, CA @ DNA Lounge
04/19 Portland, OR @ Hawthorne Theatre Lounge
04/21 Seattle, WA @ El Corazon
04/22 Boise, ID @ Neurolux
04/26 Billings, MT @ Railyard
04/29 Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St. Entry
05/01 Chicago, IL @ Reggie’s Rock Club
05/03 Toledo, OH @ Frankies
05/08 Richmond, VA @ Strange Matter
05/14 Providence, RI @ Fete Music
Peelander’s metal-themed album, Metalander-Z, is available here.
. Now let’s play this post out with tUnE-yArDs’ Pee-wee’s Playhouse-inspired video for “Water Fountain,” shall we?
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