JEFF KOETTEL - "A Jeff Koettel Christmas (1994)

I can't think of a better Christmas gift than to share this forgotten classic with the world. Here to help you celebrate the birth of Christ is my brother Jeff's "A Jeff Koettel Christmas".

Continuing on with his retarded improvised casio-core, Jeff recorded this tape in 1994 to get into the Christmas spirit by singing this tape "with a really bad cold". You can hear his head clogged with mucus on these 9 tracks. Completely devoid of self-censorship and shame, it sounds as if Jeff is reading from a book as he sings these while giving the "demo" button on his Casio a workout. Everything done in one take, I'm sure. "Deck the Halls" is the stand-out track here - pure cheese!

Yep, this sucks, but so do most Christmas albums.

Hope everyone has a happy holiday. Please leave a comment after listening.

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JEFF KOETTEL - "Bar-Nun" 1994

I’ll admit that when this was released I thought it was retarded and I was annoyed by it. Listening to it now, it’s still terrible – but in a charming sort of way. I can only assume this was released because other bands were releasing tapes at the time and Jeff wanted to share his contribution to the scene. Some stones are better left unturned, but I’m flipping this stone over anyway.

Jeff received a karaoke machine for Christmas one year and used it to make fake “radio show” tapes and three tapes of original “music”. Jeff had no training in music at all, couldn’t play any instrument. Jeff could, however, press the “demo” button on a keyboard and sing stupid songs over it, songs about Diet Pepsi, Rex (“where you always pay less”) and whatever else popped into his head. Make no mistake, this stuff is terrible, but it’s a great snapshot of a time that has passed. You can really hear how much fun he was having recording this nonsense.

In 1994, Jeff had a big birthday party at our house and invited a bunch of bands to play there. GHOOM, CITRUS BOY, GRISTLE and THREESKIN all played, but it was Jeff’s party and he was to do a set of his music that evening too. By the time all of the other bands finished playing, most of the audience went home and he ended up playing to an empty garage. I always felt bad about how that went down, like we completely took the wind from his sails that night, but being his older brother – I probably did shit like this all the time and didn’t think much of it.

This is total bedroom / bored-core stuff. Today it would probably be labeled “tardcore”, but when Jeff recorded this stuff he wasn’t listening to anything like this (I don’t remember him listening to anything but Dead Milkmen and Pantera at the time) and came up with all of this crap on his own. Jeff managed to completely rip-off Wesley Willis without ever hearing him.

This is the second of Jeff’s three tapes, I think, and of the three – this is the one where his “musicianship” was at it’s peak. Jeff later went on to play keyboards in SCAT, a doom band that eventually morphed into a thrash metal band, and currently plays drums in BILLY CRYSTAL METH, an instrumental sludge/doom band.

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