Although they have always had a signature sound (grounded in the heavy, manic, precise, and strange),
Fantomas
have been fairly adventurous from album to album. So it's a little surprising that -- after hopping from the
metal
-horror spastics of their debut to an album of
film music
covers on
Director's Cut
to
Millennium Monsterworks
(an almost traditional
album in collaboration with
the Melvins
) and, finally, to last year's epic single-track
Delirium Cordia
--
would arrive back at the start. Like their self-titled debut,
Suspended Animation
is a concept album. The debut was a 30-song
soundtrack
to a comic book, with each song taking a page number as its title. This disc appears to be the
to April of 2005, with each song titled after one of the month's 30 days -- which brings us to the monumental artwork that accompanies the CD: a glossy elaborate 30-day calendar illustrated by Japanese artist
Yoshitomo Nara
. The intersecting innocence and mischief of
Nara
's
punk
munchkins match the tone of
, at least for this album. The heavy use of samples that has been a steady part of the
sound is here, but instead of the horror-movie shrieks that their first album leaned heavily on, it's a litany of bonks and whistles straight from classic cartoons.
Mike Patton
, who once again wrote all the music, is more focused than ever here. The songs (or sections, as
albums often feel like one long composition chopped into bite-size chunks) are shorter and even more frenzied; there's less brooding menace and more giddy insanity -- without ever giving way to total chaos. For all of his eclecticism,
Patton
has always had a clear vision and worked within a defined set of themes, from his work with
Mr. Bungle
to the present. Anyone who wonders what that vision and those themes add up to should look no further than
, which offers one of the clearest and most potent distillations yet. ~ Wade Kergan