COMPUTERS may be generating nightmare fuel images and weird non-existent bands, but humans are perfectly capable of creating disturbing musical horrors on their own. As these acts prove.
The Banana Splits
It’s not hard to pin down what’s wrong with this apparent pisstake of The Monkees and other heavily curated 60s pop acts. There’s Bingo’s forever-fixed psychotic grin. Then there’s the Five Nights at Freddy’s costumes that surely sat rotting in an NBC cupboard for decades, perhaps cursed or infested with rabies. Something must have caused the actors to behave with that hellish demented mania. Extreme hyperactivity, we can all agree, is a great example for small kids.
Alvin and the Chipmunks
It’s sad but inevitable that the invention of easily-sped-up magnetic audio tape would lead to these human-like rodents squeaking their irritations decades later. Even more harrowing is the way they’ve maintained their chokehold on popular culture, generating crap films and arming a young Kanye West with chiptune effects to soundtrack actual parties. Were the Chipmunks a contributory factor in Kanye’s descent into madness and Hitler-worship? Clearly ‘yes’.
Gorillaz
At face value, Damon Albarn’s foray into comics with his flatmate sounds like a harmless drunken idea we’d all have, only he actually did it and could write decent tracks. Dig deeper and there’s a lot of insidious shit beyond the devil-worshipping bassist, like a cartoon singer with no eyes that claimed to have got off with the real Rachel from S Club 7, and reanimating Shaun Ryder as if they were on a mission to give delayed-onset PTSD to drug-addled old Madchester ravers.
Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem
In this unasked-for Muppet band, savage beast Animal was obviously the drummer, while the other band members included spoofs of Janis Joplin, and, oddly, a variety of tiresome jazz pricks. If you stare at the bandleader’s top hat and shaggy beard for too long, he slowly morphs into Noddy Holder in a terrifyingly random blurring of fiction and reality that’s far more alarming than Shrimp Jesus.
Crazy Frog
With hindsight, AI brain rot fusing animals with other shit doesn’t seem so bad compared with this Swedish assault on noughties culture. The wanker amphibian’s antics and ding-dong f**kery have seeped into everyone’s brain like a parasite eating away any fond memories we had of Eurodance. He was even given a penis by his creator – a cruel joke even the most humourless supercomputer wouldn’t come up with.
The Wombles
Elisabeth Beresford’s Wimbledonians were cute and cuddly to begin with, but then songwriter Mike Batt decided to dress himself up as a monstrous Orinoco resembling a yeti, with a Tomsk who stared at kiddies with cold, dead, bulging eyes like Momo. As such it’s hard to see the festive cheer when they crop up on yet another Channel 5 Britain’s Favourite Christmas Songs countdown playing Wombling Merry Christmas. It’s unclear what their link to Christmas is in the first place, unless they brought baby Jesus a gift of rubbish.
