7. Renaldo And The Loaf
It's probably a bit harsh to have Renaldo And The Loaf so far down the list, as they make a pretty strong claim to be the single most weird (to the point of being terrifying) band of all time. However, their relative obscurity means that granting them the top spot wouldn't really be justified. They are seriously strange though. A duo that worships at the altar of The Residents (more on them later), their sound ultimately developed into something that has never been replicated. It's like the sound of a child riding the ferris wheel while tripping on some unknown mind-altering substance. It's just as fun, and just as scary. As described by the website The Weirdest Band In The World:
Using various tape delays and effects to distort vocals, guitars, drums and other mostly acoustic instruments, they created songs that unfurled like carnival music for lunatic asylums, full of oddly tuned guitars, funhouse percussion, nonsense lyrics, start-stop rhythms and a general sense of silliness that many a pretentious avant-garde recording artist could stand to learn from.
Yelps, crashes, whimpers, whirring, toy drums, back-masking... RATL did everything to make their music sound as utterly unusual as possible. Songs weren't important. Structure wasn't even important. Just as long as tracks kept getting weirder and weirder. Their sense of humour, critical to their work, prevented them from ever appearing pretentious. Instead, they just came across as seriously freaky. Check out their infamous video for Songs For Swinging Larvae for evidence of their strangeness. It was banned pretty much everywhere, and showcases their visual and sonic outlandishness perfectly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n3MbVoLYns