Melbolofwords

I have a recurring nightmare in which I wake mysteriously in the middle of the night, get out of bed, pull the curtain back and see this chap standing in the rain beneath a lampost, soaked with rain and sniggering to his own private murderous thoughts. He's armed with the .44 Magnum of his voice, it's loaded with bullets forged from pure early 90's synth-rock and he's going to fire countless rounds into my ears.

In case you can't be arsed clicking on the link-thing above I'll summarise: it's a guy singing songs on YouTube. Yawn yawn yawn, I know, but this guy has a twist: he doesn't write any songs and he doesn't play any instruments. Technically I don't suppose you could actually call what he does 'singing' either. He's also such an unrelentingly scary individual that the milk in that brew you're currently drinking will curdle in terror. I literally guarantee it.

Initially he seems okay: he starts off kind of chatty, makes plenty of normal-person eye contact with you, the viewer, and, y'know, seems like the sort of decent enough smiley guy you'd chat with if you were, say, on a long-haul flight on your own and you were bored. Not that I'd advise engaging in conversation with anyone on any public (or public-ish) transport, the prospect of talking to complete strangers being so alarming to me that I'd probably pretend to be foreign, make a few 'no comprende' style mutterings in a made-up language and then sit in silence for the next eighteen hours.

Anyway, this guy. Just as you're wondering what exactly it is he's doing he starts singing. I don't mean in the usual boring YouTube acoustic-cover sense. He just presses play on an off-screen cd-player and starts singing along, usually to Depeche Mode, striking Jesus poses for the webcam and then amicably chit-chatting a little at the end of the track. Harmless enough. Far be it from me to stick the boot into the proverbial goolies of some guy who's posted a ton of footage of himself singing YouTube - the sheer prospect of which makes my own very real goolies wither in terror - but no sugar-plated mountain of politeness will disguise the fact that he's a truly terrible singer. Choose your poison: you can listen to him tremble in and out of key to It's No Good; watch him edge towards the screen, laughing to himself whilst crooning moodily along to The Church's Under The Milky Way; or experience his performance of the hitherto unperformable feat of making a U2 guff-epic slightly sound worse than the original version as he dramatically mangles his way through Two Shots Of Happy, One Shot Of Sad. These are all uniformly cringe-inducing clips to witness, indeed to begin with it's a bit like witnessing a nightmare in which the teenage version of myself has been filmed rocking out in my bedroom by a camera secreted behind the mirror and then posted on one of the most popular websites in the world which I then sit down to watch. It's awful. Despite all this he seems to be having fun, most of the time, and the sheer number of tracks he's posted of himself 'singing' (all footnoted by a torrent of abusively bewildered comments) is a testament to his unshameability.

A word of advice though. Just watch one of the video clips. Two at the most. But leave it at that. Please. I'm not kidding. Watching his entire repertoire, as I have (repeat viewings at that), will leave you with a sense that you're watching someone who could be truly unhinged, kind of like Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver: his flat in the background is of an eerily constant tone of plain white dotted, here and there, with what look like repaired holes. Has he fixed up his flat for these videos? Are his walls usually lined with holes? Does this guy, when not filming himself singing along to his favourite cds, punch holes in the walls? I don't know. And then there's his clothes: always a pair of jeans and a t-shirt (again always white). Does he have other clothes? Are these his 'performance outfit'? Does he have a wardrobe full of identical jeans and white t-shirts? Are they all kept in impeccable order? Does he wear white because he likes the way they show up the blood-spatters? Again, I don't know. Every now and then he starts laughing to himself, as though you, the viewer, have just made a joke. And some of his clips aren't even songs, they're just confusing monologues which seem to reference complaints and comments no-one has made about home-made music videos he hasn't even done which seem to include some sort of staged on-screen suicide attempt. And I'm not even going to go into the cryptic 'dedication' song to 'one particular Katie' (he claims to know eight - by 'know' I assume he means 'killed with hammers'). Is all of this an extension of some kind of social thing he does in the real world? Are there more anti-performances, other clips which he's not yet posted? Are all these clips really trailers for a forthcoming mental-breakdown movie starring Christian Bale? And his name, Melbolofworlds, what the hell does that mean? I DON'T KNOW! But, one thing's for certain, keeping in mind these more distressing aspects of his YouTube existence, the fact that he's posted video clips of himself pacing around his bedroom, singing along to Phil Collins, visibly wracked with an inexpressible emotion takes on some truly disturbing new layers of meaning.

On the plus side he takes requests. My vote goes to, ooh I dunno, Inca Roads by Frank Zappa.