Richard Cheese and his band, "Lounge Against The Machine", have been performing rock and pop hits in the style of big-band "swing" for more than two decades. The person behind the persona, if I can put it like that, is Mark Jonathan Davis, and his backing band includes Bobby Ricotta, Frank Feta and Billy Bleu. All the stage names, of course, are wordplays on the subject of cheese.
I have to admire their creativity in transforming well-known tunes and songs into a whole new genre of music. I've selected just four this morning, to introduce you to their work, but there are dozens more.
Let's start with Metallica's "Enter Sandman".
Here's Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody".
How about Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"?
And to conclude this morning's lounge act, here's "Hotel California", originally by The Eagles.
You'll find much more of their music on their YouTube channel, and on the band's Web site.
Peter
5 comments:
Bill Ward of Black Sabbath said in Metal Evolution that one of the big influences on Sabbath was the Big Band stuff, and thus that music was an underlying influence to all heavy metal.
That's the crossover I want. Get some of the best metal musicians combined with a big band and do songs from both types mixed with the other.
In the Mood with crunching guitars added to the horns? Sign me up 😀
A much younger friend turned me on to Richard Cheese about 15 years ago. Since I already like the classic Big Band music, this was a natural fit. Thanks for the tunes.
That "Enter Sandman" was a suitably creepy introduction. Interesting, to be sure. I do like big band, and in fact, I think transposing a song like that into the big-band space is one of the few ways one could get me to listen to it consistently. It reminded me of _Halloween_.
Richard Cheese -- Dick Cheese? Really?
Of course, at school there was a fella named Richard Skinner . . .
Channels with Blue Grass renditions make some of those songs tolerable.
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