Infamous Menagerie

Biography

Infamous Menagerie were a Seattle phenomenon when Seattle phenomena were attracting label scouts like flies to a rotting corpse. Smelling of freshly-picked gardenias, Infamous Menagerie failed to attract any flies and so remain to this day an obscure no-hit wonder with a small but international following. It all started in Atlanta at a time when much the same sort of thing was happening in the Athens/Atlanta area, but the band escaped unharmed by heading to Seattle in search of their musical fo...

Infamous Menagerie were a Seattle phenomenon when Seattle phenomena were attracting label scouts like flies to a rotting corpse. Smelling of freshly-picked gardenias, Infamous Menagerie failed to attract any flies and so remain to this day an obscure no-hit wonder with a small but international following.

It all started in Atlanta at a time when much the same sort of thing was happening in the Athens/Atlanta area, but the band escaped unharmed by heading to Seattle in search of their musical fortune, where it apparently did not lie either.

Although Infamous Menagerie never managed to breach the Eugene Oregon barrier to the southern Cascades and Sierras, they did tour as far north as Vancouver BC, Canada, discovering on one trip that the magic phrase to utter to a customs agent to regain entry into the US if you look a little like a truck full of freaks is "I bought tampons." This may have changed with the war on terror, and in fact the ex-members of the band often discuss whether tampons could be considered WMDs in this most treacherous age. Thus the above method can no longer be recommended.

Infamous Menagerie recorded a handful of songs with Steve Fisk but they remain unreleased except for "Immediate Impound Zone," which is found on the very first Kill Rock Stars compilation. They hung up their guitars and 50-gallon drums in 1994 when guitarist Erin Schneider (now Erik) returned to school, bassist Lisa Puteska devoted herself to the food service industry, and percussionist Tori Roos found her calling as a librarian dominatrix. Erik has recently begun releasing music based on tunes that fly randomly into and out of his head, calling himself eriktrips just for the fun of it.

To describe Infamous Menagerie's sound is to engage in an exercise of futile taxonomy. Some call it "industrial"; others call it a strange dematerialization of pop hooks within a swirling chorus of pipe-wrench-like percussive mayhem. The band is one of three known to have utilized a shopping cart as an instrument, but the only one known for certain to use an Oster blender. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.