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Mr. Bungle

California

(Warner Bros.)

 Amazon

 Lala

From the sounds of the seagulls and surf that open the album to the century-ending clang that closes it, Mr. Bungle’s California covers more ideas and images than most bands could cram into a career. Anyone who has fallen under Bungle’s uncanny spell can attest to the fact that when you hear one of their albums, it stays heard. This is music that takes you somewhere, including places you did not know existed. Mr. Bungle gets inside your mind and remains there.

Mr. Bungle only released three albums in the ‘90s (in part because the various members kept busy with other projects, like Faith No More, Fantômas, and Secret Chiefs 3, all of whom made incredible and important recordings during that decade), and each successive album represented a considerable leap forward. The band’s self-titled 1991 debut was an ambitious, genre-splicing experiment that combined carnivalesque whimsy with occasionally disturbing subject matter: it was about what happened after the circus left town, metaphorically speaking. Mr. Bungle endures as a psychedelic hall of mirrors that remains delightful and disorienting, no matter how many times you hear it. Their next release, 1995’s Disco Volante, upped the ante and managed somehow to be both weirder and (at times) more accessible than its predecessor. A song like “Desert Search for Techno Allah” (and before you even listen to it, think of the awesomely odd images that title conjures) defies description—it’s a techno mash-up with eye-popping musical proficiency. The band’s brand of weird science offers no quarter: this material affronts non-believers and turns adventurous listeners into fanatics.

Incredibly, after another four-year interval, California synthesized the band’s numerous compulsions (surf music, proto-funk, eastern rhythms, jazzy noodling, and ingenious yet oddball lyrics) into a cohesive whole. The confidence and focus displayed throughout their third album is on an entirely other level. On each of the ten tracks you might hear traces of Frank Zappa (both the comic and the composer), Captain Beefheart, Ennio Morricone, and the Ventures. The band cruises from one influence to the next with arresting ease, perfecting a sort of laid-back lunacy, a controlled hurricane of intensely opposite styles that inexplicably make complete sense.

Aside from being the Mr. Bungle masterpiece (Disco Volante boasts some of the band’s finest moments, but taken in its entirety it’s a tad too disjointed and self-indulgent; it’s a schizophrenic near-miss), California is the culmination of their cut-and-paste surrealism, marrying the stop-on-a-dime intensity with a kitchen sink sensibility that incorporates the entire universe into its vision. More so than any previous album, Mike Patton’s prodigious (and possibly unparalleled) vocal range is fully utilized, allowing him to explore everything from retro-crooning (“Vanity Fair”) to campy faux-lounge (“Pink Cigarette”) to relatively straightforward rock (“The Air-Conditioned Nightmare”) to the utterly unclassifiable (“Golem II: The Bionic Vapour Boy”). The band continuously weaves a west-coast vibe into the mix, winking and nodding with playful but heartfelt invocations of the Beach Boys, Hollywood, and (as always) surf music filtered through a distinctively postmodern heavy metal M.O.

California is not even a collection of songs so much as miniature sonic movies. Take “Ars Moriendi”, for instance. The opening seconds somehow blend a thrash guitar/drum riff with an accordion waltz (imagine hardcore gypsy music), then Patton enters with his operatic flourishes, singing lyrics like “All my bones are laughing / As you’re dancing on my grave”. The song navigates the incongruous edge between head-bang abandon and Turkish wedding music that makes you want to slamdance while doing a polka. Or consider “Goodbye Sober Day”, which is like “I Am the Walrus” on Peyote—think the outro of Syd Barrett’s “Bike” thrown into a blender with multi-tracked falsetto wails cut by one of Sun Ra’s stranger big band workouts. And that’s just the first 30 seconds. The song goes on to incorporate Gregorian chants (convincingly) and a Balinese monkey chant (seriously). All while the band slowly disintegrates into oblivion like the bad guys’ faces melting at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

There are also gems of calm and clarity, like “The Holy Filament”, which showcases Patton as choir boy, and “Sweet Charity”, which sounds like Phil Spector working with Brian Wilson. Then there is the track that epitomizes what worked best on the previous albums, “None of Them Knew They Were Robots”. Here is the Bungle aesthetic at full effect: Hawaiian music crashing into Carl Stalling cartoon territory—keyboards and horns and Trey Spruance’s quicksilver chord changes—with a brief but convincing Elvis impersonation serving as a sick cherry on top. Oh, and it somehow manages to swing. It’s a madcap laugh, to be certain, but it’s also absolute genius.

And so, it’s a shame that the boys couldn’t keep the party going after Y2K, but considering the subsequent gifts we have received from Secret Chiefs 3, Tomahawk, and Fantômas, it seems churlish to complain. Besides, if Bungle was going to go out on top, the third time was a charm—the project where all the disparate elements and obsessions came together. California is an album that sums up the 20th century while burning the bridge to the 21st, an eternal fin-de-siècle celebration. Sean Murphy

µ-Ziq

Royal Astronomy

(Astralwerks)

 Amazon

 Lala

Given how prominent techno and electronic music in general was in 1999, it’s still not surprising that Mike Paradinas remains an obscure figure, although it is a shame. His early brutalist albums have held up surprisingly well (particularly 1997’s Lunatic Harness, which ought to be mentioned in any conversation about Aphex Twin’s peers), but the one that my friends and I stumbled upon in high school was his even more gonzo (and thus far, totally singular) Royal Astronomy album. In addition to encompassing a myriad of sounds and styles and having a very individualistic, defiantly cracked sense of sound design, Royal Astronomy stands as one of the very few proper LPs of what they used to call IDM that actually provides an interesting, intelligible listening experience today.

Paradinas and Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James collaborated in the ‘90s, but nothing the latter did was weird in quite the same way that Royal Astronomy is. Paradinas toured with Björk and was sufficiently influenced by her live string section to started working with real and fake strings as well, even while he started in a relatively poppier direction, and also brought in hip-hop vocal samples. Sound like an unholy mess yet?

The range of Royal Astronomy is best summed up by its first two tracks. “Scaling” starts the record with strings and bells and odd little synthesizer fillips, and for four minutes it sounds unconcerned with any of the practical considerations that touch music made by humans. A timpani thuds away softly, the strings soar, the same little melodic figure calmly repeats—the result is sublime. Then “The Hwicci Song” dopplers into view with rapidly sawing strings and a more determined melody, only to be interrupted by turntable scratching (which does kind of sound like ‘hwicci’) and a sampled MC repeating “You want a fresh style / Let me show you” until it frays. There’s a beat poking under it rather than just some percussion, and it’s a fantastically busy one—Paradinas, like a lot of his peers, often suspended free-floating melodies above knotty, driving drum patterns, but does it so well he makes it fresh again.

Best of all is “Carpet Muncher”, a beautiful little production that in three minutes shows off little bits of all of the facets Paradinas was working at, and is as close as this music can get to killer pop. Elsewhere, Paradinas throws nearly everything at the wall—the horror movie soundtrack of “Gruber’s Mandolin”, the terse spitting and crazed synth buzz of “The Motorbike Track”, the queasy synths of “World of Leather”, the reflective choirs of “56”, “Mentim”‘s far-off explosions, the peaceful-village-on-acid video game “Slice”, Japanese fan Kazumi’s expressive and amateurish singing on “The Fear”—and it all sticks.

Part of this is cunning sequencing: opening with a string of immediate and ingratiating tracks, rationing out the harder/longer tracks over the course of the album to give some balance and heft to proceedings, and throwing you just enough curves to keep you interested. But the songs on Royal Astronomy are varied and fresh enough to this day that they keep you coming back for more. Now if only anyone had heard of the damn record. Ian Mathers