California

text

Mr Bungle remain the best kept secret in rock music; while their cult following is growing larger, particularly in the US, it's still rare to find anyone that knows their work (mind you, when you do, they're generally a major fan). So, for Bungle newcomers the story seems to run something like this: bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Danny Heifetz, alto saxophonist Theo Lengyel, tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Clinton McKinnon, vocalist Mike Patton, and guitarist Trey Spruance got together in high school, drawn together by a mutual love of both radical experimentalism and hard rock (they named themsleves after a kid's educational film, just for the record). Wind forward a few years: Patton gets the gig as Chuck Mosley's replacement in Faith No More (Trey Spruance will join him a little later), so Warners, for whom FNM were HUGE, sign up the Bungles just in case. They record two major label albums, the eponymous debut and Disco Volante. FNM, meantime, fold, leaving Warners stuck with the most perplexing rock band in the world. (Yes, this is a concise history, and probably inaccurate - if anyone wants to fill in a bit more detail please feel free.) So here's the third Mr Bungle album on Warners and fuck me if it ain't the album of the year (to paraphrase an FNM album title). California is AWESOME. It's also a very different Mr Bungle indeed. The usual stuff's all in there: the genre-hopping, the fruitcake lyrics, a general sense of mania and, of course, the hints at being, actually, the best heavy metal band on the planet. But where Disco Volante in particular was characterised by radical jump-cutting, California works its cleverness into songs; wayward songs, for sure, but songs nonetheless. And, as luck would have it, the songs are all absolute corkers. It's dumb to even attempt to describe what's going on here, but highlights include drop-dead perfect Beach Boys vocal harmonies, a death-metal take on klezmer, a couple of surf guitar moments, the song 'Sweet Carity' (the best anthem this side of 'Teen Spirit'), Hawaiian steel guitar licks hung around a back drop of squawking seagulls (and that's just the album's opening)... you get the idea. Everything's executed stunningly, with total conviction, and utterly convincingly. And the production is flawless, catching the sound of each quoted style perfectly. Oh, and Patton's the greatest singer in rock, by the way. To sum up, then... A friend put it to me that there are more ideas in California than many musical artists have in their entire careers. He wasn't wrong. Oh, just so that you know, Mr Bungle are playing a Millenium Eve show in San Francisco with Fantômas (the band Patton's put together with Melvins guitarist Buzz Osbourne, Trevor Dunn and one-time Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo) and the Laswell-Zorn-Harris power trio Painkiller. It's sold out, of course, but I've told my children that they may be sold into slavery to raise the funds to buy a black market ticket.