Cool yer jets, hot shot! Here ya go!
Title: California
Artiste: Mr. Bungle
Genre: Experimental/Avant-Garde
Familiarity: I've heard
Disco Volante and was not very impressed, though that was for Metal Month III...
1. Sweet charity: Well this is nice. Birdsong, Hawaiian guitar, whistling, slow ballad, very relaxed. Really nice. Sort of a dreampop idea to it, while retaining a rock swagger. Good start.
2. None of them knew they were robots: Bit more frenetic; kind of a rockabilly idea in this. Pretty amusing though. Organ is great. Bit overlong maybe.
3. Retrovertigo: Gorgeous little acoustic ballad. Oh, okay: it ramped up there but it's still lovely. Really like this one.
4. The air-conditioned nightmare: Kind of a weird sense of The Beach Boys about this. This is a track Frownland wanted me to listen to but then changed his mind when he saw I'd been recced the entire album. Kicking up now with a melange of surf rock and what may approximate to death metal? Weird indeed. But good weird. Now it's gone into a kind of bluesy, West Coast thing. Idea of The Eagles, sort of thing.
5. Ars moriendi: Russian folk music? Mad violin and accordion. Bit of Mexican guitar, Mariachi, dart of metal thrown in. Kind of all over the place. Now there's an acoustic piano for a moment, then it goes back to the accordion. Kind of. I can't keep up. It's a little too overwhelming, hard to pin anything down.
6. Pink cigarette: Seems to be a slow blues song with a kind of Arabian melody underpinning it. Definite sense of Elvis's slower stuff here. Nice backing vocals. At least it stays the same, doesn't genre-jump every three seconds. Flatline at the end is hilarious. Yeah, you're going blue.
7. Golem II: The bionic vapour boy: Don't quite know what to make of this. Waits/Beefheart meets boyband with a bit of funk. Weird.
8. The holy filament: This one's nice, kind of chant over a piano. Elements of progressive rock/ ELO. Nice.
9. Vanity Fair: Bit of doo-wop/soul now. Cool.
10. Goodbye sober day: Yeah, this is too out there for me. Ends badly really, which is a pity.
End result: Overall though, a lot better than I had expected and not as hard to get into as
Disco Volante. Some very good tracks. I still wouldn't be seeing myself becoming a fan or anything.
So, Love or Hate? I think it would have to be a
Love, really.