Fantomas

Delirium Cordia

Ipecac

By Timothy Gabriele

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” The revised answer to that infamous question posed by rockabilly god Link Wray might deservedly be stated, “Fantomas knows.” The answer is indeed appropriate seeing as how Fantomas covered Henry Mancini’s “Experiment in Terror” (itself a clever knockoff of Wray’s “The Shadow Knows”) only two albums ago and has here scored the most sinister, unsettling, 74-minute single-track album that you will hear all year.

Glenn Branca paved the way for experimental rock symphonies back in the early 1980s so the 74-minute mark should not be misconstrued as boundary-breaking. Regardless, “Delirium Cordia” does go through various rumbling phases and as the bands latest experiment in terror it could have just as easily been divided into separate “chapters” like Fantomas’ eponymous debut. Like a David Lynch DVD, the inability to peruse Fantomas’s newest release for your favorite parts is an artistic choice by the band members who would kindly ask you to absorb the delirium of “Delirium Cordia” in one sitting.

For those who don’t know, Fantomas has been touted as a supergroup comprised of, Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle), Dave Lombardo (Slayer), Buzz Osbourne (Melvins), and music veteran Mike Patton. Though each member does yield a certain degree of mastery to their discipline, it is really the addition of Patton that garnered the group the notoriety that it now has.

When Patton’s Faith No More disbanded in 1997, the news hardly came as a shock to anyone. Though they would later be credited with creating rap-metal (an honor I’m sure Patton is kicking himself over now), FNM were almost immediately passed off as a one hit wonder. By the time their cleverly titled swan song “Album of the Year” tanked among critics and fans alike, few could deny that the breakup was likely for the best. Besides after years of fighting and alienating their fanbase, most hardcore devotees knew that Patton had already moved on to produce his best work with other projects.

Hardly an offshoot of those many projects and defying the time-honored tradition of supergroups sucking horribly, Fantomas came hurling into the world like a wad of pent-up rage detained under years of thankless touring and mind-numbing screams for “War Pigs.” In this new incarnation, Patton’s voice worked as the fourth instrument of destruction and nary a discernible lyric was to be heard.

After an album covering various film scores and a jumbled live collaboration with The Melvins, Fantomas are back with a concept album scoring some kind of horrifically botched surgical procedures. Deliciously packaged in a pitch black casing with a glossy booklet of disturbing, surgical photography by Max Hellweg, “Delirium Cordia” begins with the sound of a needle dropping onto the spindle of a turntable as if this were a recently remastered soundtrack to a forgotten Dario Argento classic. There definitely is a feeling of being out of time on “Delirium.” Not as if trapped inside an irregular heartbeat as the literal translation the album’s title suggests, but rather one feels like they were being transported back to a golden era of horror films where the musical accompaniments were not just stocked with Static X outtakes.

Though consistently cited by sampledelic artists who simply pinch a Herrmann or Morricone loop onto some hip hop beats, the only time that these ominous works are adequately represented in their full symphonic grace is when oddballs like Patton and Dunn’s Mr. Bungle project choose to provide some unsettling downtime between their bipolar spazzouts.

Patton’s haters are usually not impressed and surely the mostly beatless ambience on “Delirium Cordia” will have them begging him to go back to California with the Chili Peppers and grow his hair out again.

It’s easy to sympathize with the naysayers sometimes. His pretensions not only call attention to themselves on this project, they oftentimes scream at random intervals or yodel out in Benedictine chant. The last twenty minutes of the album contain only the sounds of a turntable groove, clicking at the pace of a weakened heartbeat. Is the turntable/ CD player here representing the pulse of an Electrocardiogram after the aforemented sonic surgery? Could the record needle be substituting for an IV needle? Or are Fantomas just yanking their audience around with utter contempt being the motivation behind this hysterical tedium?

One cannot deny the sheer audacity or intensity of his vision however. Fantomas enlists bell chimes, rattling clocks, theremin-esque synths, romantic piano, doctors whispering, unidentified squishy objects, funeral hymns, and resonating gongs. And that’s all in the first 10 minutes.

Elsewhere discordant, off tempo pianos collide with conflicting bass drum heartbeats and Patton scats frantic syllables like a madcap doctor getting crazy with the scissors. If they were truly trying to epitomize the sound of being awake during surgery though, the searing pain of the experience would probably instruct the piece to be a scathing, dissonant Masami Akita-inspired noisefest rather than an eclectic collage that often slides into loungey upright bass plucks and soft Italian crooning like it does 32-minutes into “Delirium Cordia’s” first and only track.

A more insightful metaphor for the album’s acoustically symbolic territory would be the score to one’s dreams when going under the knife, after being anesthetized with Nitrous Oxide and LSD. This may better account for the album’s mostly somber ambiance of disconcerting gusts of wind and shuttered backwards-masked voices followed by the occasional anarchic breakout.

The result is harrowing, albeit a bit cheesy at times. Though Patton and company incorporate an array of new effects into the mix, his tribute to the dated perfectionism of the fabulous imported horror composers is very loaded. If you can look past these anachronistic references or even (God forbid) indulge in them, you’re likely to find one hell of a record whose warm breath and hovering scalpel constantly dangle above your numbed body.

“Delirium Cordia” is Mike Patton’s “Kill Bill”: an experimental pastiche of an album that tries to smush everything in at once. The result is a little bit overwhelming, but to doubt the man’s surgical care of the material, given his devotion to it, seems not only ignorant but also downright heretical.