Bone In The Fan

You must be kidding.

I like monsters. I do.  And  I love music.  But I’m not so sure the two of them do a chocolate-in-my-peanut butter, peanut-butter-on-my-chocolate kind of a thing if you catch my drift.  Case in point?  Lordi, the Finish “heavy metal” (you’ll understand the quotes in a minute) band I saw on Conan last week.

The press shot is suitably creepy. In a stupid teenage bedroom poster kind of way.

Don’t get me wrong: bands that wear heavy makeup or costumes don’t automatically suck.  But for every New York Dolls (admittedly not in the same class, but they’re actually touring again!) or Kiss (the commercials for the upcoming Kiss shows at the Nassau Coliseum that ran during Midnight Special back in the mid-70’s actually disturbed me), there are dozens of Twisted Sisters.

Lordi, though, falls a miles short of even Dee Snyder’s band. I was flipping channels and heard Conan introduce them.  I thought I had heard of them; thought they might be one of the silly death metal bands with names like Cradle of Filth that I’ve seen on shitty television shows designed to scare the hell out of anyone with teenage children.

Not even close.  Lordi sounds like a bunch of talentless high school outcasts who huff cans of spray paint behind the arcade and talk about how bitchin’ satan is (”Dude, I love satan” “Dude, me too. The dark prince rocks.” “Dude, hell yeah, hail satan….we should start a band!” “Dude, fuck yeah!”).  The song itself sounded like a cross between something on a Best Buy salesman’s iPod and a keyboard-heavy hunk of radio sputum from a third-rate 80’s hair band.

There was one redeeming aspect to it though: the combination of how ridiculous the music was and how monumentally stupid they looked was fucking hilarious.   Hilarious enough that I taped it and showed it to Joanna in the morning, who got one of those “no way” looks on her face that are so much fun to watch other people make.  The masks are so heavy that the lips barely move, which made the bassist and guitar player look like Spridle and Chim Chim from the original Speed Racer cartoons whenever they sang backups.  Then there’s…well just look for yourself (by the way, what’s classier than taking a photo of your TV?):

Um, dude? You might want to flip through an American Sign Language dictionary sometime.

I have to assume the lead singer was trying to score points with satan by throwing up the sign of the goat; you know, the devil horns and all.  But what he’s doing in that photo there is signing “I love you”.  Which I guess is nice too.

Lordi gets 1 out of 5 bones.  And that one is for the laughs.

Oh, and because he loves us.

Bookmark and Share