Sunday, October 23, 2016

Scary Halloween Sounds

Guess what? I have enough stuff to make a Halloween entry this year! Halloween items are actually quite difficult to come across. Most of the time I'll have to skip over Halloween, but not this year! Well technically, almost everything I post is scary as hell, but when you take something scary and make it even more scary, it's DOUBLE scary! You'll have thoroughly pissed your pants by the end of this blog entry, so let's get it done with so I can laugh at you...


Famous Ghost Stories with Scary Sounds




Pickwick is one of those record labels who either puts out some really cool stuff, or bottom of the barrel garbage. I didn't have much hope for this one, but honestly it's quite well done! It's basically a collection of scary stories with a bunch of cheesy sound effects added into the mix. Most of the credit goes to a Pickwick employee named Wade Denning who produced this album, adapted some classic tales, and even wrote a few of his own. Some of the classic stories include The Headless Horseman by Washington Irving and The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe.

For this round, I chose to focus on a Wade Denning original called "A Visit to Transylvania". It's probably the lamest track on the album, but that's why we're here.

Listen to A Visit to Transylvania



Andy Forray - Drac's Back




This strange song combines a dumb idea with a groovin' disco beat! It's about Dracula going down to the discotheque to find his victims. He sings "I wanna suck your..." followed by a group of ladies singing "Ooooooh!" as if he actually wanted to suck on their pussies. Actually, I think that would have made a more interesting song idea than this one. The B-side is even worse with a dumb and uninteresting song called "Carry on Sharon" which has nothing to do with Halloween, and is therefore not included here.

Listen to Drac's Back



Hallmark Cards - The Sounds of Halloween




Hallmark Cards decided to make their mark on Halloween-themed merchandise by recording a bunch of shit and selling it to people stupid enough to shop at their expensive stores.

Side one is 20 minutes of some of the WORST sound effects I've ever heard in my life. These have been enhanced by a tape-echo effect and someone playing with the speed control on the tape recorder. The screaming is hilariously bad. I would love to see a video of the lame-o studio actors screaming into the microphone.

Side two has some exotically shitty covers of Halloween-esque songs. I've heard a lot of bad covers of Monster Mash, but this tape has the absolutely WORST version I've ever heard. The guy doing the vocals sounds like he smoked a goat turd and is flying higher than a kite. The backup singers fuck up the background vocals half-way through the song, and end up singing the wrong part. This makes the rest of the song sound awkward and stupid. The producers in the Hallmark recording studio must have just said "fuck it, the first take is good enough"

The cover of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" will have you laughing at the get-go. The guy making the howling noises mostly just sound like a drunken dipshit who thinks he can dance and sing. The vocals are done by a female, which has been typical for all the Michael Jackson covers I've heard. She does a decent job on the vocals, but the song becomes handicapped when the part originally done by Vincent Price is tackled by a guy who's scary voice would make grizzly bear fall over in hysterics.

Listen to Monster Mash
Listen to Thriller
Listen to Sounds of Halloween



That's it for this round! I'm going to be back on air with Kent Davies on November 16th. We'll be having a grand ol' time playing some of the terrible stuff I've found recently. If you're in Winnipeg, tune into 95.9 FM at 5:00. If you're not in Winnipeg, then I'm sure nobody will mind if you fly out here and stay at Kent's house for that day. He won't be home anyway.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Junq tour: Ashern 2016 (part 1)

Back in March, I was "sick" from an "accident". You can read that as "Ben pooped his pants and got a rash" if you wish, but it caused me to miss work for a few weeks. As part of my self-imposed therapy, I took a drive out to Ashern Manitoba and spent a few hours going through the piles of junk at the thrift store. I had obviously been a while since I was there, because I walked out with about 20 CDs (yes, only CDs) that looked absolutely atrocious. I've retained 14 of them for this entire visit. Since there was so much, I decided to break up the Ashern visit into two entries.

I found I had a couple of decent discs out of the batch, but the crap certainly outnumbers the good. Let's get started...


Brandon Beemish - Islandbeams



Might as well start this entry on a good note. Just think of it as enjoying a really fantastic meal before going to the toilet to eliminate your previous meal where you ate nothing but candy. You know it's going to be a really long one, so take pleasure in the good things before crunching your eyes shut, and enduring the pain of an extremely hard cluster of shit.

Brandon Beemish has recorded some wonderfully sugary-sweet power pop. I'm currently very much into power pop, so this stuff is just right up my alley. The music reminds me of a cross between The Shore and Josh Rouse. This is very summery music, so if there's an album you should play while laying on the beach, this is the one to get! I'm only going to post one song and leave it up to you to support the artist and get the rest of the album. Good artists deserve money for good work!

If you get a chance, go to his youtube channel and click HERE for his excellent cover of "Long Long Long" originally done by The Beatles.

As a side note, this album is going into my personal music collection. That doesn't happen very often, but this one deserves it!

Listen to So Softly! You won't be disappointed you did!



Razzmatazz For Kids


I really wished this was the Nazareth album. That would bring me much more joy.

You know things are starting to go downhill when we start singing about herpes. To be fair, this isn't the worst CD in the batch. The musicians sound mostly talented, even if none of them are members of Nazareth.

Everybody sing along now... I had the chicken pox (FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!)

Listen to Chicken Pox Blues!



Guardian Angel - Wind and the Sea



After the CDDB detected this disc as the cd single for "Ride" by The Vines, I was hoping it was a genuine error. No dice...

Sometimes I pick up albums that are still sealed and wonder why the previous owner did not open it and play it. They must be able to pick up vibes through the cellophane.

This CD has three songs that sound almost exactly the same and are the same length. Creativity stopped after the first song was written. The production work is terrible. If you've ever felt the need to vomit while meditating, I'll have no problem selling you my copy of this.

It was really difficult to figure out which version to give you for your listening pleasure, but it's all identical with the exception of things being mixed louder than others in each mix. Congrats to the guy who mixed this for discovering volume controls!

Listen to Guardian Angel by Guardian Angel!



"No Rewind" To Be - Released Fall 2007



So here's a nice lady named ""No Rewind" To Be". She seems nice. She likes to wear brown. She's not a natural red head. I'd tell you more about her, but there is absolutely nothing else to go on but the cover and the song titles written on the CD.

She has a nice voice, but she ruins the fuck out of "Let It Be" by The Beatles. Why do so many people feel the need to butcher this song? It's almost as popular as "The Rose" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". If Paul McCartney were alive today, he would be certain to cut her leg off.

Listen to "Let It Be"



The Smudge Fundaes - Sing For Your Supper



It takes real balls to clone "Sadeness" by Enigma (with a hint of "All That She Wants" by Ace of Base) and turn it into a song called "Alex The Alligator".

These songs are supposed to be amusing and funny, but the people singing it sound like they need a couple of doses of Paxil to cheer them up. There is no happiness to be found in their voices, and I can't blame them when they're singing these crappy songs. I can't help but wonder how many members of The Smudge Fundaes have ended their lives.

Listen to Alex The Alligator
Listen to Coconuts



Lyle E Style - Singled Out



In the world of music, you have exactly 10 seconds to make an impression upon your audience. Lyle E Style decided to fill that 10 seconds with the sound of someone urinating on the sidewalk. This sums up his music quite well, since the lyrics are whiny and pissy. They are also very poorly written.

Here's a sampling of the garbage I've been subjected to. I'm guessing these are all first drafts:

So I drown my sorrow and swallow my tears
Hoping that this feeling will dissapear
But the very next morning, it's still the same
I wake up crying... Her name is Pain.

and

Girl take this heartache with you when you walk out that door
There's no sense trying again cause I can't take no more
When things go wrong once, they'll go wrong again
I've been around this world, there's other women

and

But princess you'd be fun
Come & play with me hon
Anytime, anywhere, name the place
And baby I'll be there
You'd be fun.

and

How am I going to live a Christmas without you here
It's hard to accept that now you're gone girl, I'm I'm filled with fear
Baby, can you hear me singing to you now?


So how many of you took your lives while reading that bullshit???

I like how he looks all tough on the album cover, and he's crying like a little bitch in his songs.

It's oh so difficult to choose a horrible song off a 4-track sampler when all 4 songs are pieces of depressing shit. So I picked the one with the bad pick-up lines in it.

Listen to You'd Be Fun



Major Conrad Flapps - World in a Flapp: Musical Take-Offs From Around The World



You just know the album is going to be awful when you have a clown pilot on the album cover and he's named after the act of masturbation. It's a shame that he wasn't clowning around (or fapping) while flying his plane, leading to a horrendous crash before recording this album. On the plus side, with all the violent clowns in the news lately, Mr. Fapps probably has limited time left on this Earth to be putting out shitty albums.

Allow me to summarize what you're about to hear...

Flafrica - You won't be missing the rains down in Africa with this song. It sounds like awful taco bell jungle music. The animals in the jungle consist of one stupid clown pilot making unknown animal mating calls and fart noises. The name of the song is the joining of "Flatulent" and "Africa" - a true masterpiece of shit!

Sakura - If your children like smoking weed, this is a great stoner song to help them on their trip!

Cross Walk Jive - If you like good rapping, go to another website and listen to something else. This song absolutely hurts my brain, and it's SIX FUCKING MINUTES LONG.

I'm only guessing that this album is aimed at children, but I cannot imagine how ANY child, regardless of how developed (or underdeveloped) their brain is, would enjoy this album. My girlfriend flipped me the bird when I told her to take this CD to her daycare.

Listen to Flafrica
Listen to Sakura
Listen to Cross Walk Jive

I'll get part 2 up shortly, but I'd like to get a Halloween entry up this year. There's always more horribleness on the way, so keep your eyes peeled!