Fantômas

Fantômas doesn’t like you. As far as Fantômas is concerned, you can fuck right off. They have to be just about the least user-friendly band there is, but that’s okay. Because, chances are very good – extremely good, in fact – that you don’t like them either.

One of the hardest questions for me to answer, and one that I dread facing, is a relatively innocuous one. Because my love of music is so quickly apparent, it isn’t long before somebody asks me what kind of music I like. Now, for most people, this is a softball question, along the lines of where you were born or what you do for a living. But when somebody asks me what kind of music I listen to, I break out in a cold sweat. The truth of the matter is that I like all kinds of music. Well, not all kinds, but the range of music I respond to is dizzying and I find myself paralyzed trying to come up with a short list because anything I mention automatically discounts another dozen genres I really like. I was first attracted to music by the tones of the synthesizer, but if you tell people you love electronica and you’re not a naked 23-year-old tripping his or her brains out in the middle of a desert to a throbbing beat, nobody will take you seriously. So, what I usually end up doing is saying what I don’t, as a rule, like. There are a few genres that, generally, leave me pretty cold, although there are, of course, always exceptions to the rule. I often feel that anybody looking through my collection would find something they really liked, but nobody would like everything I like. That way I can be populist and elitist at the same time.

So, in broad strokes, I don’t like opera. The music can be fabulous, but the sound of a classically trained vocalist rarely does anything for me. Except for Slava (and lots of luck finding any of his albums). I don’t like “urban contemporary”, or whatever that particular sound is called these days (except for a couple of astonishingly groovy tracks from Lewis Taylor, and, again, good luck hunting him down at your local Wal-Mart). I don’t like the blues, for more than two or three songs anyway (although I think ZZ Top is pretty boss), and that means a gigantic swath of popular music is outside of my interests. Somebody in college (okay, it was Bent), pointed out that, like the Talking Heads song (or the Yeats poem from which it was cribbed), as far as my musical tastes go, the center is missing. I’ll listen to olde English madrigals, experimental electronics, tropicalia, or Portugeuse fado until the cows come home, but turn the radio on, and I switch off. Not liking the blues and its off-spring means I don’t particularly care for the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, or, pure sacrilege I know, the execrable Led Zepplin. Or, for the insufferable hipsters out there, Captain Beefheart. Any credibility I saved by not mentioning that I really enjoy electronica is immediately tossed out the window when I mention my distaste for those bands. And, while we’re at it, I think Elvis Presley is highly overrated (at least, once he was neutered by the army) and I can’t stand Frank Sinatra. How this chauvinistic, jingoistic, fair-to-middling singer with terrible phrasing fooled everybody into thinking he was the greatest singer of the century is beyond me. There aren’t enough horseheads in the world to convince that many people that they should like him.

And since the keyboard was my way into music, as opposed to the more popular guitar, I don’t particularly care for metal in any of its various alloys: hair, heavy, death, or speed. But, I love Fantômas.

Fantômas is a super-group of sorts (although an obscure one, like Channel Light Vessel). Created around the vision and truly astonishing voice of singer Mike Patton (who was his most visible as the singer for Faith No More, but has also released material under his own name and as vocalist for the bracingly bizarre Mr. Bungle), Fantômas also includes Buzz Osbourne, from the simultaneously influential and obscure group the Melvins – reportedly Kurt Cobain’s favorite band – as well as fellow Bungler Trevor Dunn and legendary Slayer drummer, Dave Lombardo. And although Fantômas would probably get filed under heavy metal (heavy like plutonium), it isn’t like anything else I’ve ever heard.

Fantômas uses the vocabulary of heavy metal – the blood-curdling screaming, the slashing guitars, the barrage of drums – but invents an entirely different syntax. Somewhat like Cibo Matto’s charming mangling of the English language and Western pop idioms, Fantômas sounds at once familiar and wholly not of this earth at the same time.

Their first, and best, album is a wonder of eclecticism. Pieces start and stop on a dime, covering half a dozen moods in less than a minute, while Patton’s voice runs the gamut of emotions, from soft cooing to terrifying guttural howl – memorably described as being like the Tasmanian Devil scat-singing. And he does it all without once forming a single word. The music is scary and funny and wondrously well-played. You get the sense that you’re in the presence of a genius, but one you wouldn’t want to be left alone with. I take great pleasure in getting in my mini-van to go pick up the kids from school and blasting Fantômas out the window, watching the other suburban parents quickly whisk their impressionable youth to the other side of the parking lot, shooting nervous glares through my tinted windows.

I was turned on to Fantômas by my friend Matt, and, as we listened to it one night, I chuckled at the impossibility of there ever being a Fantômas concert. Surprisingly, Matt had actually gone to one, and said it was one of his most memorable concert experiences. The band was clearly Patton’s, and the players stared at him intensely, following his every move, as he careened around the stage and conducted them through their unholy set. They were tight and precise and sounded remarkably like the album. The mind boggles.

But, like I said, they hate you.

They must, for they go out of their way to be as obscure as possible. Not only is the music so prickly as to scare off all but the hardiest sonic explorers, but their CDs are wonders of willful obfuscation. Their first disc, apparently self-titled (although it has the phrase “Amenaza al Mundo” clearly emblazoned on the cover, this is apparently not the name of the album), has 30 tracks, many of them no more than a minute, and all of them with page numbers for names (except that there is no listed track 13 on this disc, or on their follow-up). Apparently, the entire disc is the soundtrack for a comic book – although which one is never revealed. This makes it difficult to keep track of which track is playing and leads to stupid arguments like “Page 7 rocks!” “No it doesn’t, Page 7 sucks. Page 11 kicks ass!” and so on.

They are nice enough to list the band members on this disc, but the inner sleeve contains no words and the disc itself is black, with shattered glass lines etched across it. Their second release, entitled Director’s Cut, is them covering famous (and not-so-famous) film music, from The Godfather to Rosemary’s Baby to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me to Spider Baby. A bit more… er… conventional, Director’s Cut finds Mike Patton singing actual words. The mood changes are slightly less abrupt and surreal (slightly) and, although I don’t like it as much as their opening salvo, it’s interesting to hear how familiar music gets interpreted by such a singular vision.

And for the ultimate fuck you, there’s the third Fantômas disc, Delerium Cordia. Based loosely on the idea of surgery (I guess), the disc contains only one 72-minute track. The track goes through many different changes and dropping track markers in would do no recognizable damage that I can tell, but, no, you have to listen to it all or be forced to scan through to find particularly memorable bits. David Lynch doesn’t put chapter markers into his DVDs because he feels, rightly so, that his films are meant to be, um, enjoyed as a single piece, but I don’t see any real reason to do this on an album – or at least not on this album. The accompanying booklet contains no information and is, instead, filled with uncomfortably vivid photographs of surgeries. And, to top it off, the last twelve minutes or so consist solely of the sound of a needle stuck in a groove. Click-whirr-click-whirr and so on. There is a little something different at the very end (the final two or three seconds) but, in keeping with the tradition of sticking “bonus” tracks on at the end of CDs (after 20 minutes of silence), it totally isn’t worth the wait.

That being said, much of the music on Delerium Cordia is remarkable. More ambient than earlier Fantômas releases, it wanders through everything from Gregorian chants to creepy haunted house atmospherics, punctuated by the occasional grind-core freak out. Some of the sounds are from actual surgeries and I have no doubt that listening to this disc on headphones while tripping would be one of the most intense experiences of your life. One I am entirely uninterested in experiencing. One review of this album I ran across stated that it perfectly captured the feeling the reviewer experienced of being clinically dead for a few minutes on a surgery table, which I’m just going to have to take his word for. Almost unbearably dark and disturbing, it would be the perfect disc to blast from your house once you run out of Halloween candy. No trick-or-treater will dare darken your doorway with this oozing out of your house.

Matt has a cousin in his mid-teens who is a self-proclaimed heavy metal head. Since Fantômas loosely falls into the metal category (mostly because it doesn’t go anywhere else), Matt thought he’d play his youthful ward some of their perverse soundscapes, figuring he’d dig them. The cousin sat there with a forced smile on his face and nervous eyes, nodding half-heartedly whenever Matt looked at him expectantly. When it was over, he declared that it was “real interesting” and excused himself. Later, Matt’s wife asked what they’d been up to that day. The cousin shook his head and said, “Uncle Matt played me the worst music I’ve ever heard in my life. He’s weird”. Even with his seemingly sympathetic point of reference, for him, and for well over 99% of the public, the response to the glorious cacophony and exhilarating eclecticism and superb musicianship and depth and quality of vision that is Fantômas was clear, direct, and simple.

Yeah, buddy, fuck you too.