There’s more to trolls these days than previously understood, but it’s dense in those woods.

For instance, after accidentally shipping himself to Nashville trapped in a crate of hamburger buns, northeastern European forest troll-turned-Middle Tennessee nomad Scufflemöss Treemen was eventually struck by a car while wandering around after an existential crisis forced him out of an exploitative haunting job in the area. The hit found Treemen injured and directly confronted by the demons of his crisis: lack of companionship, dancefloor admiration, and the freedom to work with his hands on his own terms as well as the cause of the crisis—yearning for that bigger hamburger bun in the sky. Fortunately, this was all helped by the people who hit him with a car, and later, of course, Murfreesboro “skud-rawk” band The Creeping Cruds, whose live shows offered solutions to Treemen’s first two issues and, eventually, the confidence to tackle the third and fourth.

Scufflemöss Treemen now “scuffles” to promote the second full-length album from Wüden Boi, Treemen’s experimental, industrial-synth-hop, Japanese-influenced, garage-punk project evolved from his American experience.

Wüden Boi is backed by Jopi, a grim-friendly bird-faced guitarist who originated from the effects of the Hale-Bopp comet passing over Eastern Europe in 1997, while alien and far-out bassist Daddy Cat is an earth-pizza enthusiast from 30 light years away via the Space Camaro. Their drummer, Flurpi, is the rich, Southern evangelist mega-church owner’s “Flower in the Attic” son who escaped. The ensemble also has a rad producer, Dingo, who’s been helping Treemen pull all this together to get his kid back from an unleashed evil spirit, a saga made epic by Quarantine Sessions, the 2020 debut release of the group that Treemen banded together.

More recently, Music to Crash Your Spaceship To was Wüden Boi-produced and released in March 2023.

More exploratory in influences, Music to Crash Your Spaceship To sets the mood with “Lactose Tolerance,” opening in a “vastness of space,” with a David Byrne-esque wine glass hum intro going into some surgical exploration of synth rap in Treemen’s Dracula-accented vocals. Treemen now shines a troll who knows what he wants, and is evidently familiar with Puff Daddy’s flow, clueing his listeners in on what currently drives him, spitting, stuck in conditioning/holding bac scuffling/wanting to know how I can get that bling, punctuated on the half-note, as in “Victory,” from Puff Daddy’s 1997 release No Way Out.

From there, all’s fair in trolling tastes.

“Otaku Kokka”—translated to Otaku Nation, presumably, an anime discord server (an online anime chat room)—runs as “Wüden Boi’s exploration in Japanese punk,” according to Treemen. The group goes in an early Ween direction with the post-punk surfer jam “Where’s Jerry,” which ponders whether someone fed Jerry to the family.

Treemen messes around with the synth on the funky, electronica instrumental “Galaxy Phantom,” while “Big Hunk Mega Funk,” the band’s bass-driven, lyrically minimal fuzz groove metal number, warns of calamity, insanity and profanity if folks don’t get out of the way of the “Big Hunk.”

The fuzz bass-synth continues on “Robot 32: Initialization,” documenting a robot passing the Turing Test, a concept from Catherynne M. Valente’s book Silently, and Very Fast, before “Mozzerellica” (featuring Nashville guitarist and studio musician Neif) channels Metallica on Ketamine, proclaiming Gimme sauce, gimme cheese, gimme toppings if you please.

This, along with the lyrics to “Lactose Tolerance” and “Dough Roller” (which touches on Treemen’s experience working a local pizza job), lead the audience to accept the campy nature of the album, just before realizing this music is somewhat genuine local post-punk. The track “Curse for the Rotten” actually validates a bit of musical sincerity—those turn-around moments make local albums like this worth it.

“Song of my People” taps into the musical heritage of troll-folk, but Treemen lyrically concludes Music to Crash Your Spaceship To on “Bricks” (featuring DJ Shadowban) with the wisdom of a troll nowhere yet near done: Why can’t we just be free, to live the life we got / Quite literally, a person’s a person no matter how they’re hurtin’ / So let’s take the time we got to get to learnin’ / I’ve got to get to learnin’ / I’ve got my problems and so do you / Live a long life, it might be two.

Find Wüden Boi’s Music to Crash Your Spaceship To on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube and wudenboi.bandcamp.com. Keep up with Scufflemöss Treemen, free thought and area live shows and spawning festival schedules on the Scufflemöss Treemen Youtube channel, at keeponscufflin.weebly.com and on Instagram @scufflemöss.

“Keep on Scufflin’!”