Faxed Head! If you haven't heard the story, this is the band made up of former students of Coalinga High School in Coalinga, California who were all

part of a hideously botched heavy metal suicide pact that left each of them grotesquely physically deformed. After this life-changing event, the next rational course of action for these pathetic, crippled, brain damaged freaks was to form a death metal band called Faxed Head, but you've never heard any death metal that sounds like this. They call their music "desk metal", whatever the hell that means, but by now we know that this is actually a super goofy noise/metal/comedy side project that features Neil Hamburger and Trey Spruance from Mr. Bungle/Secret Chiefs 3 incognito as "McPatrick Head" and "Neck Head", respectively. The other members of Faxed Head are LaBrea Tar Pits on drums, Jigsaw Puzzle Head on bass, and Fifth Head on electronics, and the band performs in huge freakish handmade costumes that turn each of them into a shambling mutant freak. Imagine a retarded combination of of Sid & Marty Kroft, Gwar, third rate death metal and RRRecords style noise - it's totally ridiculous but pretty fucking funny if you have a taste for the bizarre.

When I saw that Web Of Mimicry was putting out a Faxed Head DVD that features the band on tour in Japan, I honestly thought that it was a joke. Hardly

anyone outside of the Bay Area has even heard of Faxed Head, but these guys toured Japan in the mid-90's? Turns out that Faxed Head did do a very

short tour of Japan in 1995 that included some shows with Incapacitants and Masonna (which I would have killed to have been able to see), and this

DVD finally releases a professionally filmed concert from the tour for fans of Faxed Head's brain-damaged, noise-infected death metal weirdness. The band staggers through a twelve-song set of mangled, sloppy death metal that

constantly breaks down into squalls of sputtering electronic blurt, corrupted samples and slide whistle freakouts and other weird noises. The "singer"

McPatrick Head is wheeled out onto the stage in a wheelchair that he continuously flies out of throughout the show, and the rest of the band flails at their

instruments and spazz out. Then, all of a sudden at different points during the show, the concert will cut away to weird footage of a Japanese high school

classroom where someone wearing McPatrick Head's head is standing in front of the class - then it'll cut right back to the Faxed Head concert and break into

the next song in progress. Very confusing.

The Osaka concert looks great and sounds killer, using three different camera angles and a loud soundboard recording. There's also some bonus material

included on the disc, like a Faxed Head show in Canada from 2001 where the band sounds much more like an actual death metal band (albeit still an incredibly

fucked up, electronics-heavy death metal band) than the punky thrash of their 90s shows, galleries of retarded artwork and Faxed Head lyrics, and there's an

easter egg that reveals a 45 minute set from the Coalinga bar-blues band The Bon Larvis Band, which is basically Faxed Head moonlighting as an utterly awful

boogie rock outfit.