FANTOMAS - Suspended Animation

Reviewing the latest work by the Fantômas is a bit like reflecting on one's own life, briefly sifting through every moment, especially the strangest ones. The result will probably be a disjointed sequence of shaky, slightly blurred polaroids, hinting at and pointing toward some larger, more expansive project. Recorded during the same, delirious sessions as "Delirium Cordia", "Suspended Animation" ambiguously represents a sort of second part, utterly dissonant yet complementary, by virtue of a desecrating, more experimental-than-ever narrative humus. If, on "Delirium Cordia", continuity, real or presumed, seemed to be the homogenizing element, here a spasmodic, violent, at times grating fragmentariness converges on the record's dominant theme: a disjointed, fleeting madness. Barely sketched out, like the polaroids mentioned above. The sinister, sprawling suite that preceded it, heavy with dark omens and a multitude of grotesque entities, now seems like a pale memory.

Across its thirty tracks, the album reveals a playful, mischievous nature, heavily seasoned — and at times rather doggedly sustained — by black humor. It's easy to picture the band playing in some new wing of Arkham Asylum, in front of an audience of comical, Looney Tunes-like characters, except they're bleeding. The fractured sonic fabric mentioned at the outset, which in many cases can produce a bizarre sense of detachment as well as an understandable initial resistance, turns, listen after listen, into the essential hallmark of the whole work, and its greatest strength. Only through the disorder and precariousness of the moment does Patton find the coherence of his own highly personal sonic path. That, in essence, is the record's keystone.

Paced by the everyday rhythm of a month never so packed with holidays (some real, some probably invented, unless, of course, they celebrate Eight Track Tape Day in the States), the latest Fantômas record resembles Barker's "Books Of Blood": equally schizophrenic and noisy no matter where you choose to dig in (there's little difference, really, between Thursday the seventh and Sunday the twenty-fourth). Decidedly more heavy than avant-garde at certain moments (thanks to a Dave Lombardo never so free to flaunt his Slayer-bred pedigree), studded with King Buzzo's majestic, deflagrating riffs (somewhat underused on the ensemble's previous records) and bound together by the ever more brilliant sonic glue of Trevor Dunn, the album unfolds across a myriad of extemporaneous micro-tracks (rarely crossing the two-minute mark), at times vaguely ambient, at times convulsively metal.

But the references and quotations Patton delights in weaving in transcend genre, and so we get all manner of screams, irreverent nursery rhymes, fleeting video game jingles (I spotted the opening theme of "Yoshi & Friends", an obscure GameBoy platformer from some years back), openings of solemn film scores (the nods to Angelo Badalamenti's work and David Lynch's dark imagery are unmistakable), gurgles, Lovecraftian guttural sounds, ecstatic choirs, the classic closing gong, squeaky-voiced little men endlessly saying hello, rubber hammers pounding (rubber) heads, and of course the now-familiar whispers and chimes that the former Faith No More man uses in abundance. Even in the more drawn-out episodes (actually quite rare, and in any case bound to be interrupted), you can feel that sense of suspension (indeed), of incompleteness, of systematic rupture with the word "song" that Fantômas keep (re)vowing to tear down.

The result, as we said, is a corrosive sense of disorientation, which, in the final analysis, stands as the album's least convincing aspect, even though it's the product of a deliberate choice. If "The Director's Cut" revealed Patton's passion for cinema, "Suspended Animation" celebrates the saccharine flavor of children's entertainment, only to subject it to an absurd, outlandish dimension, like a school play staged by slightly deranged kids who decide to put on a bloody grand guignol. Backing up this idea is the meticulously crafted artwork, courtesy of the Hirosaki master Yoshitomo Nara, the artist whose enfants terribles exported Japanese pop-art better than anyone else in the Nineties. This fourth Fantômas record (or fifth, counting the team-up with Melvins) will go a long way toward satisfying booklet fetishists: Nara's demystifying illustrations form a kind of tabletop calendar, complete with dotted fold lines.

Thirty, like the days of April, and like the tracks on the album. Naturally, there's no (apparent) connection of any kind between the illustration, the relevant holiday, and the track. The whole sonic spectrum of "Suspended Animation" floats along, trilling with stumps all in all aware of their own mutilation, like dazed cartoon characters conscious of their own irreversible failure to live up to reality.

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14/09/2017