Roomful of Teeth surely must be the vocal weird headliners
I enjoy world music, where different harmonics and techniques confuse my western ears:
Bulgarian Folk Trio
Throat singing
How about some Sitar
Anything outside our western 12 Tone temperament scales
How about Glenn Branca? Atonal symphonies for 100 guitars being banged on by drum sticks. I wouldn’t call it highly listenable, but it can work as stimulating background music for some other activity. The members of Sonic Youth were sometime members of his orchestra.
The Flaming Lips made an album that was four discs with different parts of the same tracks on them, meant to be played in rough syncronization with each other:
Much more mainstream, but Tune-Yards is pretty weird most of the time, though still catchy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ1LI-NTa2s
Oh my god all of this is exactly what I wanted. I love it. I’ve listened to every single thing here.
Absolutely! I really dig that Arcturus track. It’s the vocal half-steps that do it for me.
These are all great. I particularly liked the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum track. A recurring theme in this thread seems to be music videos that enhance the weirdness. I feel like I just watched the video from The Ring after @charmtrap’s post.
Case in point. It’s like watching a bad trip. Fantastic. G-Spot Tornado is great as well. It reminds me of James Ferraro.
Yes, definitely. Western music consists almost entirely of whole- and half-tones in major and minor keys, but go elsewhere and you get all kinds of amazing scales and harmonies.
The Mars Volta - Cassandra Gemini
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyUMHEua7-A
Dengue Fever - Sni Bong
Menomena - Tithe
The Tiny - Pet Sematary
A lot of Self’s stuff could fit here
https://youtu.be/jw9CZcEw3iY
Chk chk chk (!!!)'s first album, Louden Up Now, is a good fit:
Aphex Twin is a lot:
Ok this is the wrong kind of weird but here anyways:
https://youtu.be/byDiILrNbM4
I love that album Deloused in the Comatorium by The Mars Volta, great pick.
And Turkish and Arabic tuning for the semitones are subtly different tuning than the Persian they may have derived from. And then there are oddballs like the Gamelan 5 or 7 tone scales (Indonesian/Bali slendro or Java/Thai? pelog) and hexatonic, which was popular in the Italian renaissance, and also in many Native American tunings in addition to pentatonic.
The meters can also be challenging, like 5/4 (10/8) as in Take 5, or 9/8 which features in Turkish/Greek/Roma dancing music (1-2-3,1-2,1-2,1-2 or 1-2-3-4,1-2-3-4-5) or even 11/8.
I guess I could see Boney M’s Rasputin as a weird song looking at now in hindsight. At the time it was a huge hit, and it was the kind of cross generational pop hit that had my older brothers listening (Pink Floyd fans, as one example of their tastes) and my father listening (Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole fan, as one example of his tastes). It was constantly playing in my house.
And then when we moved to Qatar, Qatar TV’s government run English channel had no commercials, especially back in 1981/82 when we moved there, so each show was a little too short to fit in an hour or half hour, so they used to fill the rest of the time with songs from Abba (mostly Dancing Queen), and Boney M’s Rasputin. Thinking back on it now, the programming director at Qatar TV really, really loved these two songs. (Rasputin and Dancing Queen).
They were weird enough to be included alongside a teen magazine that the girl I had a crush on in 6th grade had that listed the “Strangest music” of the day – alongside Devo, Klaus Nomi, and Kraftwerk. Of all those, Boney M seems like the one that stayed furthest on the fringe. I mean, Klaus Nomi is wonderfully Klaus Nomi. And Devo and Kraftwerk both broke their own barriers…but when you pick up a Boney M record, you think you know what it is – “Oh, this is probably dance-y funk-ish disco stuff.” Which, sort of? But also: “What in hell is going on here?”
And as someone points out in the comments for “Rasputin” points out – this is a band with Jamaican singers living in Germany and playing in a German band doing a song in English about a Russian political figure, while wearing outfits from Asian culture and appearing on Iron Curtain-era Polish TV.
I guess the biggest question here is “What’s weird?”
If I pick up a record of Karlheinz Stockhausen compositions, or Erik Satie…I kind of know what I’m getting myself into. Or, say, Albert Ayler, John Cage, or John Zorn, also. I guess I’m saying that the two records by The Olivia Tremor Control might be weird music, because interspersed between traditionally structured songs, there’s found sounds and music concrete that are going to seem way far afield…but they’re on incredibly psychedelic records with cubist artwork on the cover by a band called “The Olivia Tremor Control”, so you tell me which is weirder and more alien here: the 40 minutes of recognizable, incredibly melodic Beatle-esque music and song structures, or the 30 minutes of someone dangling a microphone out the window of their car.
If I go to pick up a Cramps record…or a Klaus Nomi album…or Lene Lovich or pick your flavor of deliberately outside-the-mainstream artist, you kind of know what rollercoaster you’ve just bought a ticket for. That’s why I’m always kind of more fascinated by stuff like the Beatles’ White Album (imagine how subversive that must’ve sounded in 1968!) or Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Or Neil Young’s early 1980s period, in which he seemed determined to make records from every current genre and you got Re-Ac-Tor, Trans, and Everybody’s Rockin’…which sound nothing like anything he’d done before or has done since.
And I get the whole subverting expectations as artistic expression too…but I guess the final component that makes stuff seem weird to me is when something goes beyond that subversion to being something truly alien-feeling. I mean, from a truly weird standpoint, has anything quite as odd and completely head-scratching as Garth Brooks’s album as “Chris Gaines” come out in the past few decades? :)
The subjectivity of this question is why I tried not to put any guardrails around what I solicited as “weird.” I think it’s really good that there hasn’t been any gatekeeping on this point so far. We’re all products of our contexts, and that will ultimately define what we think of as weird. After all, if I had been raised on the slendro or pelog scales @sillhouette mentioned, American Top 40 would sound utterly alien to me.
Sometimes, it’s just a song. Sometimes, it’s a song plus a video. And sometimes, it’s the whole thing - song, video, historical context, regional context, and so on.
For me, it’s something that I know will make my wife say, “What the fuck is this?” when it comes on in the car. And to paraphrase Potter Stewart, I can’t define it but I know it when I hear it.
That’s a great definition, honestly. :)
In fact, this thread sparked a discussion with a music nerd buddy of mine that I talk to about once a week by phone during the plague times. And he suggested that the two weirdest Pink Floyd albums are Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here…because those are the two most traditionally structured, song-based, non-explicitly narratively guided concept records in the Pink Floyd catalogue.
A lot of noise/industrial I’m sure would be thought of as weird by many folks but I’m kind of avoiding posting that stuff, but a band that is at times Industrial, Laibach, are just fucking weird man.
I mean… you could just sit there and name-drop, trig, or you could post a Chris Gaines video or something else that YOU consider weird. :)
Heh. Garth apparently is pretty aggressive about keeping his music off streaming services and apparently doing aggressive copyright claims on Chris Gaines posts on Youtube.
Excellent post.
(And also, just to be clear, I do agree about Rasputin and Boney M. I just wanted to share my own memories of that song, I was not trying to guardrail in any way).
Speaking of popular songs at the time that made me say “What the Fuck is this?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ
I missed Bohemian Rhapsody originally, obviously, since I wasn’t born yet. But when this started hitting the radio in 1991 1992 because of Wayne’s World, I just could not wrap my head around a song this weird at first.
Of course, that changed over time because some of my friends already knew the song, and it was played on the radio so much, even I was joining them in singing it when it came on soon enough.
Yeah, it’s crazy how hindsight, frame of reference, and popular culture changes perspective. Because “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a crazy weird song. It’s bonkers. But now it’s about the most mainstream thing ever, too!
Since I was asked for an example and because any chance to promote the genius of the late, great Bill Doss is something I’ll jump on…
Here’s what about 60% of the recorded output (by recording length) of the released output of The Olivia Tremor Control sounds like:
And yet, here’s what the other 40-45% sounds like (and this is one of their more musical sound collages):
One of those songs is weird.
I just don’t know for sure which one it is!
This thread absolutely requires the inclusion of Frank Sidebottom.
The same could be true of so much of 70’s prog. Gentle Giant, Yes, ELP, King Crimson especially, Genesis and others all have some extremely weird stuff out there.
