ARNOCORPS @Asylum 2 Birmingham 2/7/12

Ok. Lets get this straight. Arnocorps are amongst the most ludicrous bands in the world. Here is a group from – as RTM understands it – San Franscisco, but who claim to be from Austria and speak with fake German accents onstage.

In 2006 they put out their (so far as we know) only album. Helpfully they entitled this magnificently dumb opus “The Greatest Band of All Time” and by the way, every song on the damn thing is named after an Arnold Schwarzenegger film.

Well, now they are back, touring the UK to (they say) to coincide with the Olympics. Even more helpfully they claimed to have been added to a list of banned substances that World Anti Doping body WADA had for the games. This ban was subsequently lifted, the band said and subsequently put out a press release saying that athletes were welcome at their shows.

RTM doesn’t know if there were any Olympians at the Asylum. But we can confirm that much of the crowd was in military fatigues, many carry toy guns and sport camouflage paint. Those that weren’t were cajoled into putting some on by assembled Arnocorps men (RTM resists). This is not an evening to be take too seriously.

And so it is that the lights go down just after 10pm, Little Richard’s “Have Some Fun Tonight” blasts out and some men dressed as soldiers carrying guitars as bayonets run through the crowd, high-fiving as they go. They are quickly followed by an Arnie lookalike waving a big black flag.

This is how Arnocorps like to enter the room, it seems.

When they do arrive onstage it is with “Arno Intro,” which literally introduces us to the band, and all hell breaks loose. They have a punk ethos to things. The crowd are onstage, the band crowd surfs and everyone has the time of their lives.

The songs? Well the songs don’t really matter but are pretty standard heavy metal, but “Predator” kicks things off and “True Lies” gets an airing as does “Total Recall”...enough said? Far more entertaining are the band themselves. Frontman Holzfeuer is quite outstanding. He insists on calling us “heroes and sheroes” and when someone explains its their friend's birthday he tells us all that “right now I will show you how we celebrate in Austria, right now” in his best cod-German accent.

With the announcement that we will get one more if we scream, the band are back from whence they came. The crowd screams, they duly reappear for “Last Action Hero” and off they go for a  collective crowd surf before bidding us Auf Wiedersehen.

Of course Arnocorps are a one tick pony, but they are best one trick pony there is. There aren’t any other bands like them – and RTM cannot decide if that is a good or bad thing!