Fantomas - The Director's Cut

Towards the end of May, the first album from Peeping Tom will be released. It's said to be Patton's most commercially friendly album since his arena rock days in Faith No More. Patton claims it to be his take on pop music, which is a fairly decent justification for his re-entry of more easily palatable music. To add to this already great news, the list of people he'll be collaborating with is something else. Whilst tracks with favorites of mine such as Massive Attack and Kool Keith are bound to be amazing, there's also a song featuring the ever bland "jazz" musician, Norah Jones. I'll be posting some tracks up here as soon as my pre-order arrives (yes, I'm that much of a nerd).

Whilst I'm waiting for this exciting prospect to arrive in my mailbox, I figured now might be a good time to revisit one of my favorite of Patton's other projects. Fantomas features members of The Melvins, Mr Bungle and Slayer and they are dedicated to the skill of interpretation. Each record is generally the band playing with a concept or already existing piece of music. Last year's "Suspended Animation" saw them playing with cartoon like music whilst creating complex nonsense around the days of the calendar. The one track long "Delirium Cordia" saw them making a soundtrack of their own in a the-music-tells-a-story like way. However the most enjoyable release from the band so far has been their reworking of film soundtrack scores gathered on "The Director's Cut". Most of the tracks switch between a level of ambiance and completely unexpected but cleverly timed outbursts of violence that causes you to stay on your seat through the duration of the album. There's also some humor in the realization that under all this chaos that you're in fact listening to the theme from The Godfather.

Fantomas - The Godfather (Theme)
Fantomas - One Step Beyond
Fantomas - Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer

Buy The Director's Cut from Amazon