Even with the detailed (and Complete-ly relevant) 4 minute intro, I still could not believe what I was seeing and hearing.  It is truly beyond description and you have hereby been warned:

I have laughed uncontrollably and absolutely to tears a handful of times in my life, and this video is responsible for probably the most uncontrollable and convulsive laughter I have ever experienced.  Nothing can prepare you for what you will see here.

Quite possibly the greatest music documentary ever made.  And please watch the whole thing…the narrative comments are totally worth it, as are the interview bits.  It’s a shining cautionary tale of how practice sometimes doesn’t make anything remotely close to perfect.

So, to quote the should-be legendary documentarian Dave…

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…COMPLETE

Rating:  10 (ten) out of 5

This happened this morning, as I received a link from a French band that has been labelled “Avante Garde Metal.”   That pretty much sums up their sound as it’s not like anything you’ve likely heard before.  Elements that shouldn’t be together are stirred into the pot to create an insane thrill-ride of sound that has me confoundedly shaking my head in a way that I haven’t since hearing Hot Head Show’s brilliant 2010 debut The Lemon EP.

The band here is called Akphaezya and is built around a theatrical concept that you can read about on their website.  As for sound…imagine Gwen Stefani (note: Dr. Chadrock’s assessment, and he’s right on) convincing her buds in No Doubt to listen to nothing but Dillinger Escape Plan for 6 months and then go in and record an album and you’ll get the idea.

Seriously…you’ve never heard this before.

But the best thing to do is simply open your mind…and enjoy Abysmally…

Celebrate their music in 2012, since it’s supposedly the last year of our existence anyway.  Click the link below to see the full list with some great pics of the boys in their element on stage.  Props to Dr. Paulo for sharing this link and to LoudWire for creating such a nice tribute on their website.

And look for the 10 Most Truly Abysmal Albums of 2011 and the 10 Most Truly Abysmal Songs of 2011 coming shortly.

RIP:  Rockers We Lost In 2011

When they submitted their follow up disc to their label , Interscope, around 1997 it was rejected.

Yep.  And it never saw the light of day until a year or so ago.

For the life of me, after listening to the long-awaited release of that follow-up disc Feeler I don’t know what Interscope was thinking.  This was every bit as good as their debut disc Rubberneck, and I’ll never understand it being rejected.

Proudly unorthodox as all of Toadies discs are, it’s a joy to finally be able to crank these songs and bask in the glow of some great modern rock.  This song is my personal favorite from Feeler and is one of my 2 or 3 favorite songs they’ve ever done.

It just rocks relentlessly.  I love Toadies!  Love ‘em, too, and enjoy Abysmally…

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD Feeler AND OTHER TOADIES MUSIC THROUGH AMAZON.COM

When David Bowie set up his legendary Ziggy Stardust performances at the Rainbow Theatre in England, he hand-picked a band to open the show…a band that would itself rise to legendary status in the annals of rock music without the international success of Bowie himself.

The band included noneother than Brian Eno himself in their ranks when they did the (then) unthinkable…they released a debut single that wasn’t included on their debut album, simply titled Roxy Music.  That single was Virginia Plain, and is a great example of a stellar pop song that for some reason fell on deaf ears here in the States.  That figures, as American top 40 radio has rarely been a breeding ground for musical innovation…this song being a shining example that “pop” doesn’t have to be a dirty word.

This song reached #4 on the British charts in 1972 and nearly 40 years later is our WAV…enjoy Abysmally.

CLICK HERE TO BUY The Best Of Roxy Music, INCLUDING THEIR DEBUT SINGLE “VIRGINIA PLAIN” FROM AMAZON.COM

They first gained national exposure with the song “Bitchin’ Camaro” from their 1985 LP Big Lizard in My Back Yard, but this is the first song I personally ever heard and it’s been stuck in my subconscious world ever since.  Especially since they refer to “California Dreamin’” as a Beach Boys song.  LOL  Enjoy Abysmally…

Punk Rock Girl (Album Version)

Beelzebubba

Meanwhile, while this battle was going on in Britain, here in the United States our pop radio was being inundated with the usual milquetoast drivel by Whitney Houston, Maria Carey, NSync, Backstreet Boys, Brittany Spears, and whatever bad pseudo-metal was left over from the 80′s bands who refused to put away the hairspray.  (Incidentally, all of the bad leftover unused 80′s “power ballads” would later become country hits.)

But I digress.  Most Americans know Blur from the quite wonderful “Song 2″ off the self-titled Blur album, but this band was making incredible music for years before that.  This week’s WAV is the song that achieved them that first number one hit in England back in 1995 and, considering the current state of our US economy and the real reason our economy is in this state, it’s perhaps even more relevant 16 years after the fact.

An excellent song and a pretty funny video to go with it.  Enjoy Abysmally…

In the meantime, I’ve managed to find and watch the notorious 1987 box office bomb called Ishtar.

Oh, how I’ve wanted to see this movie. For about 20 years I’ve wanted to see this movie, just to see if it is as bad as all the reviews I’ve read. Historically, Ishtar is regarded as perhaps the most colossal box office flop ever, collecting only $14 million at the box office in the wake of a ridiculous $55 million dollar production budget. Yep…this was 1987 when $55 million dollars was the equivalent of at least twice that now.

Before the movie was even released it was fodder for the merciless media, who were only too happy to report the ludicrous over-budget expenses (much of it was filmed in Morocco), the studio management shake-up, the director/actor blow-ups on the set and the friendships that suffered. My curiosity was piqued, however, when I read several interviews with co-stars Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty where both men defended the movie.

Hoffman said that given the opportunity he’d “do it again in a minute.”  Beatty called the movie a “very good, not great, comedy” and lamented that every review he read of Ishtar began with criticism of the production budget and the problems encountered during the making of it. He openly wondered if the reviewers even actually watched the movie.   Grammy award-winning songwriter Paul Williams, who wrote the hilarious excuses for songs sung in the movie also was positive about the experience: “The real task was to write songs that were believably bad. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve never had more fun on a picture.”

After all this off-screen hullabaloo, I was finally able to watch the movie recently and found myself chuckling consistently throughout.  It’s not a fall-on-the-floor funny movie, but it’s entertaining and there is some really clever dialogue and some excellent absurdist situational humor. Some of the scenes with the blind camel actually did have me laughing myself to tears with the ridiculousness of it all.

In Ishtar Hoffman and Beatty star as Rogers and Clarke, two absolutely dreadful songwriters bent on finding success in the music biz. After failing on the local scene in New York, their manager gets them a regular gig as lounge singers at a hotel in Morocco, telling the disheartened pair “Most musicians would KILL for a gig in North Africa.” Things begin to go awry as soon as they arrive at the airport and they find themselves in the middle of an attempted overthrow of the government by leftist guerrillas. The key to the overthrow is an ancient map of Ishtar that a mysterious woman named Shirra is trying to get to the guerrillas, which tells of two “men of God” who will come to save the people from the evil government.

Through botched gigs and a quite hilarious trek through the desert featuring vultures, black market arms dealers, and the aforementioned blind camel, Beatty and Hoffman dodge the CIA and the guerillas while they try to figure out just what the hell is going on. It’s all a pretty ridiculous premise to be sure, but it’s important to remember (should you ever get to watch it) that it was intended as an offbeat variant on the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope “Road to…” movies of the 1940′s and 1950′s. I may be in the absolute minority here, but taken in that context I found it to be well done and full of some good laughs, never resorting to cliché’ and featuring scenarios and dialogue with tongue firmly planted in cheek.  I will happily watch it again.

Ishtar is one of those movies that I really think could have a life of its own on DVD, as there have been many movies that didn’t necessarily do that great at the box office but became legendary due to popularity as rentals. This is Spinal Tap (a far superior movie to this one) is a great example, as it was not a huge hit in theatres but also had a much, much lower production budget and has been re-issued several times on DVD. There have been some really crappy movies that have made it on to DVD, yet a decent movie like Ishtar has never been given that chance here in the United States.

I think it’s about time to change that.  This is a funny, entertaining flick that is gaining status as a bonafide cult classic.

I love to laugh and have my own list of some favorite comedies like This is Spinal Tap (my alltime favorite), The Big Lebowski, Amazon Women on the Moon and Top Secret!    Frillman’s blog (sounds like a movie title, actually) really blew me away because his top underrated comedy movie list included some of my favorites and introduced me to some new faves like Idiocracy.

Anyway, check out Norman ‘Willy’ Frillman’s Really Funny Blog and get introduced to some movies destined to make you laugh till you cry.  Some other great topics are on there, too.  As Frillman himself describes it, “In this space I will write stupid life observations and document the absurdity of the human condition.  In other words, this is a complete flippin’ time waster and it should be pretty funny.”

It is.  Click any of the link words above to check out his blog, if you haven’t figured that out already.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.  Abysmally, of course.

Lynott always commanded the most attention, followed by the trend-setting guitar duo of Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson…the guitar duo most responsible for bringing twin lead harmonies to the forefront and making them important to the hook of any given song.

And then there’s Brian Downey…a drummer who seems to have always been under the radar and completely escaped my attention. You rarely see his name mentioned with the great rock drummers, yet he absolutely deserves to be mentioned with them…a fact that is obvious on the Live and Dangerous video.  Downey is a champion.

From that video is one of my favorite Thin Lizzy tracks.  One that captures the diversity of their sound and Phil Lynott’s penchant for painting vivid pictures with his storytelling.

Enjoy Abysmally…

As a chaser, I found this cool version of the song as done acoustic by Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins…