Just when you though Eli Manning couldn't conform any more perfectly to his dweeby-younger-brother-who-probably-takes-stamp-collecting-very-seriously image, he goes and does something like share his workout playlist with ESPN.com. And then he throws you a massive curveball.


The list is packed with everything you'd expect it to be—Kenny Chesney, Dave Matthews Band, Tom Petty, John Denver—until you get to "Fill Up My Cup" by Technopop Slashfest. "Hey, I've never heard of that band," I thought to myself. "I wonder what their deal is."

Well, their deal is that they are incredibly weird. First off, the song is actually called "Fill Up My Glas," and it is a such an aggressively bizarre piece of Eurotrash technopop that you start to suspect it's some sort of satire—a novelty song, maybe. It was uploaded to the group's MySpace page in 2007. A sample lyric: "Straight from Romania, it's a party in the mouth!" It's the kind of song that every one of Peter Stormare's creepy German characters would listen to. If you were making a so-bad-it's-bad techno drinking song as a put-on, you would want it to sound like this. (From what I could tell, Technopop Slashfast has only one other song, "Partytree," about which there is little to say except that it supports our novelty-song thesis.)


And then there is the odd bio from the group's Myspace page, which reads in part:

Technopop Slashfest was created during November at a Norwegian folk high-school in Søgne, Kristiansand. During the stay at the schools cottage at Hovden, under the movie-project Suzanne, two of the students (Alexander & Vegard) started joking around with a glass and a mug of water during one of the meals.

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So what the hell is going on here? Is this all a gag that Eli is in on? The band does possess a dormant yet authentically Norwegian Facebook fan page, but nothing there guarantees that they aren't just some weird novelty, and this is all we have in the way of an official band photograph:


You can listen to "Fill Up My Glas" for yourself above, but be warned. Afterward, you will never be able to look at Eli Manning the same way you used to.

Eli Manning listens to this working out [ESPN]