Who is this guy? I’m going to cut to the chase here. It’s Thor. Once a minor figure in the heyday of eighties metal, his combination of bodybuilding, sword-and-sorcery, and falsetto-metal has never been equaled. He was completely over the top: Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge” without irony or apology, or GWAR without the hipster factor. It was fairly successful (the English seem to have eaten it up), but it was doomed; as soon as Pearl Jam’s Ten came out, acts like Thor’s had about an hour to get out of Dodge. The last time I was in Olympia, I ran across a Thor album that had Thor in, you know, a Thor suit on the cover, and it was hilarious and wonderful, and I ran around Olympia making everybody listen to it; since then, by eerie coincidence, Nardwuar had run into Thor somehow, and he’d asked him to play along this year.