Fantomas - Fantomas

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Music reviews of Fantomas

Music Review: The Spartacus of Soundtracks
Rating: 5 Stars

This is probably not the strangest album ever made, but it certainly sounds that way. Other reviewers will tell you who the musicians are here, but except for preparing you for Mike Patton's Tasmanian Devil scat, knowing that ex-members of Mister Bungle, the Melvins and Slayer are on this album is more misleading than helpful. Most of the time, this is a fast, heavy, manic thing (Patton matches his more-than-usually impressive shrieking and vocal insanity with guitar & high-hat combinations to great effect all over the place), but the mood swings are vast--there are mellow spots, there are out and out eerie spots as well. The fourth track (one of the longest) features a sci-fi keyboard kind of backdrop intercut by crushing drums, male laughter and the (filmic) sound of a woman being tortured--and just as that dies out, a surprisingly ominous, very slow (very Melvins) funeral dirge starts with Patton crooning in his best falsetto over the top; a weird vocal burble follows that reminds me of Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" briefly, before launching into another quick section of super-heavy thrash, and then an Ennio Morricone section, complete with bullet shot to start it off. By contrast, the fifth track starts with an almost Brazilian sounding percussion thing before slamming off into more blazing, grinding guitars-bass-drum (for a total of 46 seconds). Nor is this just a mash of noises--Page 22 reprises Page 4 and 5 in very abbreviated form. In general, generalization is simply not possible, except to say that it hangs together in a very impressive way. It's easier to talk about the album as a whole.

To begin with, the album is meant as a soundtrack to a comic book, with each composition being a page consisting of a variable number of frames. Page 1 has six frames, for instance, but trying to spot where one frame ends and the next begins is a dicey proposition at best, and not necessarily necessary from a listening standpoint. As a result, it should not be surprising that most of the 30 pages clock in between 30 to 100 seconds, so that the only proper way to experience the album is by listening ("reading") for the full 43 minutes from cover to cover. There are no lyrics--only Mike Patton's super-caffeinated vocalizations--so do not expect the music to tell a story; again, the album is background music to the campily pulpy and appropriately fictional comic book "Amenaza al Mundo" ("It Threatens the World").

Obviously, reviewing individual songs here would be as silly as reviewing a single page of a comic book. Listened to continuously, distinguishing where one song officially ends from another is as dicey as sorting out the frames within each song, which is entirely the point. Patton has been accused of making self-indulgent noise elsewhere and here as well, but the way he chops conventional (and even non-conventional) song structures into bits here gives a wink to the listener that it's very conscious and done entirely with purpose. You're not supposed to be thinking in terms of songs.

More to the point, as an experiment in the musical genre of the soundtrack, it is unusually effective and persuades the listener/reader to pay attention in a way that standard music very rarely does anymore--ironically (and deliberately) so, since a soundtrack is not usually something that takes center stage of one's attention anyway. As a result, it is a soundtrack that eclipses the subject matter (the comic book) to which it is attached. Think of a soundtrack as the whore or the slave of the visuals that it accompanies (be it a book, movie or video) and you will realize that what you have here is a rebellious slave that "Threatens the World" of pop culture's complacency; I wouldn't be surprised to find a musical reference to "Spartacus" in here somewhere. And in an age where music videos seduce us into /watching/ rather than /listening/ (so that we end up buying what is really a rather lame album when we hear it on the CD player without pictures), Patton is reversing that dynamic and reclaiming the sphere of music for music. The comic book, like the pop culture it serves as a symbol for, is fake; only the music is real. And a more "inappropriate" soundtrack for that kind of corny culture object (book or movie) would be hard to image. Listen to this and think "sound track to Spiderman" or "what would the MTV video for this look like" (at 79 seconds average per page) and you will realize what a rebellion against culture is going on here. ...

Description of Fantomas

Alternative Rock CDs

• Music > Styles
• Hard Rock & Metal
• Pop
• Rock