Growing Mold
album by Radioactive Chickenheads
Growing Mold is the first studio album by the California comedy rock band The Radioactive Chicken Heads, independently released on the band's own label Snail Sounds Records on March 30, 2005.
Overview
The first studio album released by the Radioactive Chicken Heads following their name change from Joe and the Chicken Heads in 2004, Growing Mold also marked a change in sound from the band's early ska punk influences into more eclectic and experimental territory incorporating rock, punk, new wave, blues and country, a combination of styles which (un)Leash magazine described as "like early Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo meets Dead Kennedys meets gothabilly monster mash".
Growing Mold's low-key independent release flew under the radar of major music publications, but critical response from zines, university papers and alternative weeklies was largely positive. Of the more notable reviews, UC Riverside's Highlander called the Chicken Heads "one of the best bands you've probably never heard of", praising the "delightfully eclectic" album's "sly, quirky humor" and "off-the-wall style". The OC Weekly, however, offered a more ambivalent opinion, noting that while the lyrics were "funny" and "the sonic nods to...sci-fi movie soundtracks are amusingly campy", the Chicken Heads "are a band that's best swallowed live" and that studio recordings "can never grasp the entire C-Head experience".
Although Growing Mold didn't receive any conventional radio airplay, "I Eat Kids", a cowpunk cover of a 1978 song by offbeat children's musician Barry Louis Polisar, was selected to air on the nationally syndicated novelty song showcase The Dr. Demento Show in July 2005. In November 2006, the Chicken Heads appeared on an episode of The Tyra Banks Show, performing "Our Last Song" as part of a talent show-themed episode which featured intentionally weird and unusual acts. The band ultimately lost their set to John the Running Painter, a painter on a treadmill, by an audience vote of 73% to 27%.
"Pest Control" and "I Eat Kids" were later re-recorded and "I Looked into the Mirror (What Did the Mirror Say?)", was remixed for the Chicken Heads' 2008 album Music for Mutants, each of which received music videos.
“Growing Mold” enters the record as album by Radioactive Chickenheads. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Growing, Mold and album can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Growing Mold” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Growing, Mold and album provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16841144. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2004, 1978 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Growing Mold” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.