Austin avant-meisters
Brown Whornet (
myspace) are like creeper weed: you kind of go "what the fuck? not bad..." at first, but slowly it envelops you. The faux-crooning and musical weirdness and tongues in cheek start to warble your own sensibilities a bit, and this is a good thing. Fans of Ween, Zappa, and Mr. Bungle / Fantomas should really like them, but they do have their own peculiarities, both musically and in their presentation. Chicago Reader says: "
Brown Whörnet mangle free jazz, luv-me-baby R & B, parodically straight hardcore, and something that sounds like Yes on a boom box whose batteries are dying are all in their arsenal." They do musical scores for old silent movies ("Nosferatu"-1922, "The Adventures of Prince Achmed"-1926, and "The Lost World"-1925), their live shows often see costumes and slide slows, and have been as likely as (my heroes) TFUL282 (who they've toured with, along with Melt-Banana and Wesley Willis) to use outtakes from the studio or even a late-night hotel jam sessions on their releases. Brown Whornet have been on hiatus for a while, but are back with a series of new releases that they are making available as free downloads. They've got about 300 hours of audio that they're going to be releasing - two episodes a month, each episode containing more musical ideas than most bands' discographies. Releases like this are normally known as a podcasts, only, of course, these are called
Brownloads. And to celebrate, they're playing a rare show Saturday night in Austin, I can't wait.
Although for some reason this stuff's not linked to on their main page, don't miss the
other page with a Brown Whornet jukebox, plus downloads available
HERE and
HEREThis is a newer song that was a track of the week at garageband.com earlier this year:
And these are from a couple of older albums, the first three from
Now I have A Pussy (funniest album cover of all time) and the fourth from
Emena Pesticode, and both are available as a package deal along with a cassette as a Valupack
HERE, along with lots of
other releases sure to make your collection a bit more interesting.
Brown Whornet "Lik mye balls"
Brown Whornet "Outside World"Brown Whornet "assboss"Brown Whornet "Surf Song"The first track holds special meaning to me - in 2002 I was doing my first stint on college radio before eventually moving to England for a bit, but before I left this was the last track I played.
Visit the Brown Whornet shop.
Yeah for me. I've managed to keep this blog going for a year now, and my download numbers keep increasing, so it's good to know I can still turn people onto music, take them on a slightly different musical journey than they would have. People always have a curious reaction when they first hear the name Funeral Pudding. It is actually an album by one of my all-time favorite bands, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 - from San Francisco and often on Matador Records. The odd juxtaposition of words is what always caused it to stick in my mind, and when I needed a name for my old college radio show, it worked, especially with my oh-so-clever tagline "as commercial radio kills music...". So anyways, here's a couple of tracks from TFUL282's Funeral Pudding (buy):
