I was looking through a folder called “Me from work,” meaning the stuff I had saved on my old work computer that I removed promptly before leaving.  There’s an image folder.  It’s full of hilarious wierdness.

Old Work Goodness Number 1: The Beavers

looks like someone needs a good ass-kicking

WTF is this?  I mean, aside from clearly being a Japanese ripoff of The Beatles.  This album cover made me laugh out loud.

Time for some research.

The initial search (cleverly done: “beavers”) yielded nothing but pictures of beavers, and an informative Wikipedia article which described beavers as “large, semi-aquatic rodents.”  Not the kindest set of adjectives and nouns to string together to describe an animal that can build its own home in a single night.  Be cool, Wikipedia.  Beavers are pretty great.

Second search: “beaver music”  A Swedish group came up.  I listened to one of their songs all the way through; all three minutes and forty two seconds.  Specifically, I watched the music video, which consisted of stock footage of someone typing on a typewriter, a silhouette of a happy couple in front of a sunset, and shitty home footage of some horses running in slow-motion on a beach, for fuck sake.  I should have stopped fifteen seconds in.  Here’s a sample of their lyrics:

Hesitation in a place pristine / Revelations of a space unseen / Knowing you from the inside out / That’s the only way to let you out / And that’s all that I care about.

Yikes.

Third search: “the beavers japan”  Apparently there’s a clothing store called Beaver in Japan that resembles a very abstract hairy va-jay-jay.  Just squint.  See?  Eew.

the Jimi Hendrix era of album covers

Fourth search: “the beavers music japan”  Jackpot!  Someone wrote a quick bio of one of the band members, Hideki Ishima on a website called Golden Best Japan.  Before The Beavers, this guy was a member of such ridiculously named bands as: Jarows, The Outlaws, and Spiderduction before some genius at the record label told them to change it to something “cuter.”  According to this website, they only released one album with five singles.  Here are a couple of them!

Kiminaki Sekai (The World Without You), the moody, wail-y version of something that sounds like Love Potion #9.

Why Baby Why, a poppy hit in which the band shouts ‘why baby why’ and ‘I love you’ amid much more comfortable Japanese verses, and some screeching that actually sounds pretty cool.

The author of  thought the following sentence made sense: “The Beavers were known as “Japan’s Yardbirds” so it’s not suprising that they covered “I’m a Man” and “Over, Under, Sideways, Down” on this album.”  Uh, right… thanks for the insight.