ILLOGICAL CONTRAPTION PODCAST FOR 5/5/13 - A STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL EPISODE!

Cinco De Mayo Birthday Fiesta with LIVE guests:
John Lurie - Jen Kirkman - Glitter Wizard - Merkley!


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See John Lurie's paintings!
Get Jen Kirkman's Book!
Listen to Glitter Wizard!
See Merkley's photos!

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ILLOGICAL CONTRAPTION PODCAST FOR 4/28/13 – CIALIS IN WONDERLAND!

Cobras plays a metal fest in the forest.
Cory and Erik see Prince.
Comedians Amy Miller and Ivan Hernandez drop by.
Tripped out psych band Carlton Melton talk music.

 
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Follow Amy Miller on Twitter! 
Listen to Boars, Gore and Swords a Game Of Thrones podcast hosted by Ivan Hernandez! 
Get the new Carlton Melton album Photos Of Photos and melt your brain away!

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ILLOGICAL CONTRAPTION PODCAST FOR 4/21/13 – TRY A PAPAYA! WITH EG DAILY AND CRAIG CAMPOBASSO!

C.H.U.D.s AHOY!

80s cult movie queen EG Daily (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Valley Girl) joins us in the first hour!
Filmmaker Craig Campobasso (Dune, Xtro 3, Tremors) schools us on real-life alien Valient Thor in the second hour! Listen now!

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Check out Craig’s new project A Stranger At The Pentagon!

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ILLOGICAL CONTRAPTION PODCAST FOR 4/14/13 - JUICING THE WEEZ W/ PEACHES CHRIST!

C.H.U.D.S. UNITE! The pals are joined by the #1 queen of scream Peaches Christ to talk the current state of horror post-Cabin In The Woods and discuss her latest production -- a 40th anniversary concert tribute to The Rocky Horror Show with fucking Patricia Quinn!

 

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GET TICKETS TO Peaches' Rocky Horror 40th Anniversary Tribute Concert  May 10-11 at The Victoria Theatre HERE

Listen to The Rolling Blackouts here!

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ILLOGICAL CONTRAPTION PODCAST FOR 4/7/13 – THE EVIL DUD

Our guest is a no-show but the pals manage to save the show and maintain peak-goofiness throughout! Introducing new comedy group THE HAHAfarians also a surprise call from Alexandra Crockett, author of the Metal Dudes With Cats book! WARNING: LOTS O SPOILERS RE: EVIL DEAD AND GI-JOE RETALIATION!


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ILLOGICAL CONTRAPTION PODCAST 3/31/13 - MOUNTAIN DEW PRESENTS: THE SHINING

                          

Musings on the recent hubbub regarding the new film Room 237 with star John Fell Ryan from Excepter!

Comedian and former X-Games BMX god Chris Duncan joins the gang in the second hour.


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Cruisin'

Hey y'all I need your help. I'm looking to get mad laid in 2013 as my 2012 has been drier than the drum production on Danzig I. I've been training with the best Pick Up Artists in the nation, working on my extreme negging and peacocking skills. I think the perfect setting to try out my newfound talents is one of these rock n' roll cruises that all the bands are doing. Problem is I just can't figure out which one to go to! Here are just a small sampling of the band-themed cruises coming up. HELP ME PICK WHICH ONE TO GO ON!

The Kiss Kruise II seems somewhat appealing. Ladies love those big ol' Jews in clown makeup and Tommy Thayer is my favorite Ace Frehley, but in my experience it's mostly just old dads that love KISS. Also playing: Skid Row, Comedian Graham Elwood.

Lynyrd Skynrd's Simple Man Cruise I predict there is going to be some primo Southern bar hag strange to bang on this boat. According to the website, this is their 6th go-round! Some of the events scheduled include: Q&A With the band, BELLY FLOP CONTEST, Southern Rock karaoke and a tattoo social! Also playing: Doobie Brothers, Comedian Graham Elwood

311 Caribbean Cruise 2013 is like a homerun as far as hooking up with some sick ass heinas. 311 has THE HOTTEST fans and maybe, just maybe I'll get to smoke some trees with P-Nut! It's too early to list the 311 Theme Nights and other acts but I'm just going to go ahead and assume that Comedian Graham Elwood will be appearing.

The Weezer Cruise Ahh shit. This one isn't happening in 2013 :( By the looks of the lineup it looks like it was basically "The Dudes in Dinosaur Jr Cruise featuring Weezer" though. Also playing: Comedian Graham Elwood.

Mayercraft Carrier 2 Ok this has to be just one big sex boat. Everyone knows John Mayer is the biggest pimp in all of the world. I'm just worried he'll steal all the chicks for himself? Also playing: Comedian Graham Elwood.

Yes' Cruise To The Edge YES! This is going to be the #1 get together for prog cougs in 2013! I duno wtf is going on with Yes right now btw. They kicked out Jon Anderson and have a tribute band guy singing and the dude from The Buggles is playing keys. Sheesh. Still this cruise should be pretty sweet and I'm def going to hit it up. BTW my PUA name is Skeevin. If you see me on the boat say whut up. CRUISE TO THE EDGE DOWN BY THE RIVERRRRRR!

Rock Legends II There's some pretty sweet fuckin' bands playing this cruise, but there's too many of them and you just know they are going to steal all the single ladies from us civilian plebs. I REALLY don't need to compete with the current Blue Oyster Cult drummer just to get laid at sea. And I can't really concentrate on my game while Big Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas is sashaying around in his sexy white spandex. Fuck this.

Might as well just call this one POSER CRUISE 2013.

Apparently there are THREE competing metal cruises that have caused some controversy in the sacred internet metal nerd scene. More on those later...

The IllCon Guide To Corporate Instructional Rap Videos!

I've recently become obsessed with the now extinct genre of instructional rap videos from the 80s. I've been playing most of my findings on our podcast (which is live TONIGHT @ 10pm Pacific on FCCFREERADIO btw). The perfect combination of coked out CEOs making bad decisions and Reagan era crypto-racism (HEY OUR EMPLOYEES ARE POOR "URBAN" KIDS! LET'S SPEAK TO THEM ON THEIR LEVEL!). Here now I present to you my very favorites.

5. RTD Maintenance Department

Great example of "the man" trying to get on "our level" and speak "our language" through the power of "the music of the streets." I know if I was an employee of the Los Angeles' Rapid Transit Department in the 80s I would be nothing less than inspired to wake each morning and proudly crank on those buses after watching this inspiring video. Score: 6.8

4. Selling is Service



Nope. Nothing weird or awkward about these white people rapping here. Great work guys, let's put it out. 5.4

3. Pier One Imports LET'S COACHING



The most modern out of all our videos presented today. Detailing the process known as "Let's Coaching" from the geniuses ar Pier One Imports. "Let's Coaching" (Let's engage the customers! Let's make a sale!) is kind of perfect in the way it illustrates everything wrong with corporate upper management bullshit language. The awkward terminology, the emotional exploitation of their customers, the straight up lying they teach to their poor clerks. It's all there. 9.7

2. Wendy's COLD DRINKS

Wendy's are the KINGS (queens?) of instructional rap videos as you will soon see.
I'm not even going to lie. This song is fucking tight. Based around an 8 measure New Jack Swing loop Teddy Riley himself would be proud of. Reminiscent of TLC's earlier work or later DeeDee Ramone, this heartfelt lesson on how to serve cold drinks is sure to give any Wendy's employee the gusto needed to make the customer happy! Score: 8.5

1.  Wendy's Burger Rap

The classic track that made a generation learn how to love again. Not patronizing at all, this lesson on how to make a fuckin' burger has gone down in history as the premiere instructional rap video. These hamburger ladies are literal throbbing gristle. Singing gristle even! Also: doesn't feature any embarrassing white people rapping. Score: 10.0

Very Very Very Honorable Mention goes to this very incredible track released by KFC in 1987 credited to "Colonel and the Gang" on flexidisc (yes!) teaches the importance of making Chicken Littles and Shoestring fries properly, complete with references to "golden showers." If there was a video it would be number 1.

Listen to the most magical song about chicken ever recorded here.

Chicken littles are back btw. They are snackalicious. 

When drawing goes wrong pt3. Photoshop abortions.

During the previous two installments, here and here, it gradually became apparent that even amongst the bad album artwork that plagues the Internet and peoples music collections there are even worse examples of dreadful artistic vision and crap delivery. Previous posts concentrated on art that was in the most part actually drawn/painted/dribbled out by someone. They might not have had much of a idea about anatomy or have ever seen a women naked but they at least possess, in the loosest sense, charm.

Tonight's post deals with those most heinous of culprits when it comes to bad album artwork. The Photoshop abortions. Your technology can't save you.

To kicks things off, IllCon follower SoulReaper recommended this blinding piece of ham fisted photo shopping nonsense. Dismal Euphony....dismal euphotoshoppy. Sorry.

This was always one of the first things that came into my head whenever anyone mentioned bad photo-shopping. You have all manner of tools at your disposal  yet you can't even get the lower jaw of a skull right!

Not content with making it look like some pre-1997 PC game art they just go and use the most basic, default font.

You'll never get anything started slacking off like that Mr Speckmann.

Another example of not only being dreadful ( I mean look at it!) but knocked even more for having a bog standard font. Plus, a dreadful album title.

I can wager that if this image, an angel being defeated and having its life force sucked out by a demon inside a church, had been hand drawn and coloured I would probably have thought it pretty cool. Sadly someone got to it with Photoshop first.

If ever a single image summed up the plight of the regular IllCon follower then this album cover is it.

I like Benediction. I don't like this artwork. 

I still haven't been able to work out if this band are a joke or not. I could only get about 20 seconds into this video. This artwork and album title certainly suggest its all a joke.

The soft-porn/1997 "adult" PC game vibe was perfectly nailed on these two covers by everyone's favourite band we all claim not to like.

German engineering perfection. No.

Another example of quality band let down by PS1 quality artwork. it doesn't really fit.

You send something off to the printers, you send it at the right resolution don't you. I have been aware of this one for ages but I never knew the actual band name, I still don't.

Not often do tasteless album title/artwork concepts combine with bad Photoshop. But when they do the results are pretty special.

I can spot a circular saw, cyborg eyes, pink hair, robotic boobs and what looks like parts of a motorcycle. its not a magic eye image either.

Its like the cheap version of a Minotaur. A bemused armadillo. Doesn't really chase you round the maze. Just sits there looking confused.

Hypocrisy have quite a few probable entries lurking in that back catalogue of theirs. Funnily enough nearly most of it has been reissued in recent years with different artwork. I'd like to think that's because they looked back in horror at the below image.

To top it off is the one that got mentioned the most in past correspondence. Iron Maiden have done many great things for metal but this artwork certainly wasn't one of them. In my research I came across a story about how this was originally a mock up of the concept. The band saw it and decided to use it. Maybe save a bit of money. It may be true it may not be, it does sound like something you would say after many years of reflection and you slowly come to the realisation of how lame your album art is. I always like to think that Iron Maiden don't really need to go near computer technology. keep the two separate. Ed Hunter was bad enough.

Once again I will leave it up to you guys to let me know if there are any that deserve inclusion? In all fairness I spent quite a bit of time trawling the Nuclear Blast, Spinefarm and Roadrunner back catalogues and its almost another full post on some of the lame art those guys have hidden away.

Brave New World and a Half

Although its roots remained firmly planted in the buddy-comedy genre of previous decades, the offshoot emergence of the buddy-cop subgenre in the mid 1960’s began posing a challenge to post-war American society. Despite some tentative steps that decade, it wasn’t until the 1970’s that the buddy cop movie first began testing the limits of traditional social norms. It was in 1976, when the unthinkable happened; a woman became the buddy to the cop. While the foundations of the status quo were surely shaken to their roots by this and other ruptures, it wasn’t until almost a decade later that the genre really began to come into its own.

The 80’s proved to be the heyday of the buddy-cope genre, a time when the form truly crossed a threshold and, dare I say it, forever changed the face of American cinema. This is thanks to the release of Beverly Hills Cop in 1984, a film which pushed the envelope for African American characters in American cinema. That year, the floodgates weren’t just opened, they were swept from their very hinges. Buddy-Cop films became the leading edge of a social revolution, recasting conventional stereotypes with greater subtlety and nuance and daring us as individual citizens and as a nation to question long held assumptions about workplace integration and traditional ways of combining comedy and action. By the end of the ‘80’s, new and more daring buddy-cop entries arrived monthly, addressing complex social issues each time. Women buddy-cops reappeared, Soviet/American buddy cops, Japanese/American buddy cops, dog/human buddy cops (it’s own sub-sub-genre!) human/alien buddy cops, and even federal/municipal buddy cops. The 80’s was a cultural and political minefield, but Buddy Cops were ready for the challenge.

As the decade came to a close however, it seemed that the Buddy-Cop had reached its apex. It was a heady and inspiring time in America, daily forging a new nation of comedic multicultural camaraderie on the screen. Yet, at the same time the very maturity of this groundbreaking genre prevented it from fully remaking society in its own revolutionary image. The Buddy-Cop could apparently go no further. They may have been a symbol of all that was right with America, but the genre’s aesthetic complexity remained out of reach of the very beneficiaries of the new America that the buddy-cop was carving; children under ten.

In the early years of the 1990’s the genre was foundering, seemingly unable to carry through its promise of a greater society. In the bowels of Hollywood however, a chance encounter between two screen-powerhouses was brewing the formula of a new Buddy Cop that would very nearly achieve the status of its progenitors. With almost half a century of collective experience in the television industry, Henry Winkler and Burt Reynolds had a bone-deep understanding of the American intellect. But how do you translate all the complex socio-cultural commentary of Buddy Cops into an ageless cypher?

The answer turned out to be deceptively simple. By taking the touchstone of modern buddy cop cinema, Axel Foley, and effectively shrinking him into an 8 year old child, the genre became palatable to even the most sensitive of American tastes. While Foley had been a comedic loose-cannon, albeit a “good guy”, he was still a ‘black-man’ and this represented a traditional threat to whiteness that his goofy smile could never quite temper. All the imminent sexuality, violence and anger that black men represent in the white American mythos vanished and was replaced by a cute, well scrubbed and innocuous child that needed to be protected from his own naivete. With Burt Reynolds as the cigar-smoking excessive-force-using bitter old man rougue-Cop to this new incarnation of the Buddy, it was a miraculous reconception of paternalism that transcended metaphor entirely.

Cop and a Half is streaming right now on NutFlex, so go and see the the film that made the 90's the 'cool' decade.

The 6 Shittiest Little Brother Bands Of All Time

Being the little brother of an established rock star is a mixed blessing. Sure you can get more hype for your crap band but you will forever be in the shadow of the dickhead that kicked your ass when you were little. Here at Ill Con Labs we have been doing extensive research on the phenomena of little brother bands and we have come to this conclusion: THEY ARE ALL SHITTY.

Deep inside Ill Con LABS

Through many years of studying we can now bring you the definitive list of THE TOP SIX SHITTY LITTLE BROTHER BANDS EVER (after the jump)!

Canada is Just Plain Better at Music

It wasn’t until I started doing research for this article that I discovered how important the 1990’s were for Canadian music. During that glorious decade Canadians were producing some of the finest examples of contemporary soundings. While us U.S.ers were certainly churning out the hits, Canadians weren’t content merely to do the same thing well; they wanted to do it beauty. Canada took it from mere musicianship to pure artistry, honing each style into its philosophical essence as if distilling from an undisclosed variety of average grains only the finest of whiskys. Who can forget the saucy rock baladeering of Bryan Adams, who although he had a number of hits in the 80’s, managed Jesuslike to pinch off a second Billboard No. 1 hit in the early 90’s. It’s as if NAFTA resurrected his rock. There was of course also the reformulation of feminism into mass marketability which can be attributed at least in part to Canadian Sarah McLachlan, the songstress who stormed the adult contemporary field in 1993, taking her sweet grrl time to found Lilith Fair four years later. And then of course was perhaps the brightest of Canada's stars, North York native Snow who simultaneously pushed two genres, rap and reggae’ into previously uncharted territory and was also justly rewarded with a Recording Industry Association of Japan Best New Artist Award. The list goes on, but I think I’ve made my point. Texas may think they’re not to be messed with, but actions speak louder than words my friends, and Canada doesn’t answer to anybody, they already are their own country.

Still, there was one genre of music that dominated them all to define the 90’s. In the United States a lot of people, at least in my generation, look back at the Clinton Era with a sense of shame or bemusement. Sure, we wore a lot of stupid clothes and listened to a lot of shitty music, but hey, at the time it was all optimism and progress right? For the first time in 12 years we had a president that actually seemed like he might be a genuine bro. Well anyway, he knew how to burn one and liked to jam. Economically we were more prosperous than any time in the last two decades and it looked like an awesome future was literally right at our fingertips. Leave it to white people to be all depressed and despondent when they have it so good. And yes, the Canadians once again showed us how it was really done. No I’m not talking about Saints and Sinners because nobody was listening to metal in the 90’s. I’m talking about the band that boiled the Grungy slacker essence of poor-little-rich-boy Anglo-Saxon misanthropy into a potent sauce of pure despondency. I’m talking about Grivo.

Formed in Toronto in late 1995, Grivo came on the Grunge scene pretty late, but man they were fucking apathetic. Taking their name from front man and vocalist Dan Grivo, the band featured former members of a number of unremarkable Canadian alt-rock bands, but the new combination was magical. Unfortunately, as we know from far too much experience, a star that burns fifteen times as bright burns only 6.66 percent as long, and Grivo was no different.


Although the band had yet to record an album, by the following year they were already well known outside of their home country as one of the most nonplussed bands of the decade. It would be hard for me to describe it better than Wikipedia, so I won’t: Grivo became phenomenally “famous for their bleak lyrics, as well as a general indifference toward their audience, fame, and music.” Although rumor had it the band might be working somewhat half-assedly on some recordings, nothing ever materialized and it seemed that Grivo had all but disappeared and left virtually no record of their passing except for fragments of a single live performance in early '96.

Suddenly, as that same year was drawing to a close, Dan Grivo himself reappeared backed with an entirely new lineup. Making their debut on MTV, their very first  music video went on to win the Best New Video in the Jangly Upbeat Pop category for that year. And for a second time in less than 2 years, Grivo again proved that lightning strikes lots of times in Canada. They just does things better than we do up there.

  
Thanks to TooYube user Badjackcutter for the rare archival footage.