DISCO VOLANTE

Mr. Bungle are truly a legendary group. Their impact and influence is usually more than one realizes. Their sound is often duplicated, you can hear it in The Mars Volta, Primus and Incubus among other bands.

An amalgamation of sounds and styles, Disco Volante is treated more as an experience than a chunk of songs. Mr. Bungle is simply playing out what they've heard throughout their lives and transmitting it through their instruments the way they felt about it. That's the essence of Disco Volante. Mr. Bungle is presenting with extreme instrumental dexterity, how to create challenging yet interestingly accessible music.

Twisted techno, gritty surf, poetry, and pure noise bliss are among the themes of Disco Volante. Mike Patton's chameleon-like throat can compliment just about anything that Mr. Bungle pulls off, and very well, and Mr. Bungle touches a LOT of sounds. Desert Search For Techno Allah is a dirty funky mixture remeniscent of Eastern music and Herbie Hancock funk breakdancing music. Chemical Marriage where each member of the band in the same key plays the words of an Edgar Allen Poe poem. Then comes Carry Stress in the jaw, which features virtuoso playing all over with great melody, and then seguing into "The Secret Song" where are a throaty sounding character remeniscent of Buckethead's Bucketheadland gravekeeper (it might be Patton!) gets kicked out of the band. All of this is pulled off with flying colors!

The middle section of the album kicks off with Violenza Domestica, replete with eating utensils scraping against eachother, jittering, Black Sabbath doom chords, and horror polka. "Pasta pasta!" the unnamed character of this mini-story exclaims as doomy Italian restaurant music blasts throughout the background. After School Special is definitely hilarious, serious music combined with the most random theme, a teenager bragging about his parents (is it that?) Those two combined make a pleasantly uneasy song. Now we're led to Phlegmatics, a thrash metal extravaganza, but only for a few seconds of course due to Mr. Bungle's bipolar nature, then slightly touching on free jazz before jumping back to thrash. Ma Meeshka Mow Skwoz features more avant-garde vocals from Patton combined with bubbly high-octane funk with instruments you have never heard before traveling upstream in a fast funky melody, remeniscent of the first Bungle album.

The final section of the album starts with a sea-themed genre-jumping mood-inducing ten-part monster called The Bends, the psychedelic part of the album, it's pulled off well because of the overall sound is consistent and each part represents something different and it doesn't get old due to the cool effects and ideas within, some of it sounds like The Residents! It eventually reaches an intense climax and drops into Backstrokin', which is thematically the second part here of The Bends. It's effective as it blasts into Platypus which off the start Clinton the drummer is tearing it up. It's mostly a fusiony piece with lots of Weather Reporty improvisation and structure. Merry Go Bye Bye is so distinctive to the rest of the album and upbeat, that it leaves the album on a cool note. Or does it? The experimentation in Merry Go Bye Bye is among the most intense on the whole album, it's a let-loose freakout, being a culmination of almost the entire album before it turns into a live studio mess, reminding me of The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet from Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention.

Thank God for whoever let Mr. Bungle have a studio and a record deal, because maybe nothing else in the '90's showed musicians how to progress music as we know it, and as players. A complete freakout with as much substance as you can imagine. A masterpiece, Mr. Bungle is undoubtedly a freaky continuation of where a lot of old fusion and symphonic bands left off progressively.