Beg your Mum and Dad, beg them for a treat.
Scrounge around like vultures, picking remnants left from meat.
Boil and grind ‘em to a pulp, Draining blood for me to gulp,
Hydrolize what’s left to form a collagenic clump.
Imagine a children’s birthday party where the jelly starts talking back, the cake develops a nervous disorder, and somebody discovers that the dessert contains enough pulverized animal remains to make a slaughterhouse accountant reconsider his career. Such is the splendidly sick premise behind Aeroplane Jelly, the latest offering from Melbourne’s Ohms, whose principal troublemaker, Lachlan P. Rother, appears determined to investigate precisely how much musical lunacy can occupy three minutes before the recording equipment files a formal complaint.
Rother, formerly the ringleader of U-Bahn and currently dividing his time between GLASNOST and High Control Group, has developed an appetite for musical mischief that would make Frank Zappa raise an approving eyebrow. Here, the gloriously primitive aggression of The Stooges collides with Thee Oh Sees at their most unhinged, while the early psychedelic experiments of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard provide further evidence that Australian musicians have been consuming something considerably stronger than ordinary breakfast cereal.
The guitars buzz with the persistence of flies circling a butcher’s counter, while the drums administer a merciless beating beneath bass synthesizers that seem afflicted by some terrible digestive complaint. Above this mechanical bedlam, Rother’s heavily manipulated falsetto squeals and squirms, occasionally attaining the emotional composure of a laboratory rat discovering electricity.
Then comes the magnificent descent into outright absurdity. Bubblegum synthesizers and combo organs turn the proceedings into a deranged fairground attraction, complete with the sort of artificial cheerfulness ordinarily reserved for television advertisements promising children that industrially processed sugar constitutes a balanced breakfast. Fans of Suburban Lawns will recognize the same appetite for making pop music behave very badly indeed.
Beneath all this splendid stupidity sits a genuinely spicy little observation about the modern food industry. Rother examines gelatine production through images of boiled bones, extracted marrow, pulverized connective tissue, and sugary camouflage, transforming a beloved childhood dessert into a grisly metaphor for consumption, exploitation, and humanity’s astonishing willingness to swallow practically anything provided somebody makes it colorful and inexpensive.
The joke becomes increasingly uncomfortable once you realize how closely the grotesque descriptions resemble ordinary manufacturing procedures. Advertising supplies the smiling cartoon characters; the factory supplies the collagen. Everybody gets dessert, provided nobody asks too many questions.
Filmed in Peru in 2026 and directed by Triana Hernandez, the video turns a Chinese restaurant into the setting for an exceptionally dubious dinner service. Beneath red lighting and paper lanterns, Calcio, wearing a stained shirt and apron, cuddles a cake with a face, brandishes kitchen utensils, and attacks a karaoke microphone as though his continued employment depends upon it. Victor Torer’s camera tilts and spins past aquarium fish and restaurant ornaments, while vintage cartoons of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf interrupt the proceedings. Their familiar chase acquires an unpleasantly practical meaning alongside the song’s inventory of animal ingredients.
A pig’s head presides over the banquet as extreme close-ups and bursts of television static make the whole affair resemble a VHS cooking programme whose host has lost all interest in repeat customers. The closing mock commercial completes the joke: an enormous German instruction to call now fills the screen alongside a telephone number ending in 666. Childhood treats, cartoon predators, and hard selling all arrive on the same platter, with the cheerful presentation doing its best to distract from what is actually being served.
As the final single preceding Ohms’ debut album, Wechselströme, Aeroplane Jelly presents Rother at his most wonderfully deranged, juggling garage rock, mutant post-punk, psychedelic excess, and cartoonish electronic experimentation with the enthusiasm of a man conducting dangerous experiments in his kitchen.
Consider the ingredients carefully before reaching for another helping.
Watch the video for Aeroplane Jelly below:
Listen to Aeroplane Jelly below and order the single here.
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