FANTÔMAS — Suspended Animation (review)

FANTÔMAS — Suspended Animation album cover Album · 2005 · Avant-garde Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
siLLy puPPy
SUSPENDED ANIMATION is the fourth album by the extremely bizarre super-group FANTÔMAS led by the always eccentric Mike Patton who once again doesn’t disappoint in the weirdness department. On this installment in the FANTÔMAS universe we get a dual theme of incorporating their energetic speed sludge with cartoon music and other sounds of innocence ranging from children playing to little kids’ toys. The album was released as a regular album and as a limited edition which is the one i have. This package is as bizarre as the music it holds. It is bound with one of those metal spirals that are on notebooks and it contains a mini calendar which has a page for each day in the month of April accompanied by the artwork of Yoshitomo Nara who blends the innocence of youth with dark and disturbing imagery.

After an album of soundtrack theme interpretation and another strange album that only contained one track lasting over an hour, FANTÔMAS goes back to the formula of their debut and ups the surreality a few notches by delivering an extreme roller coaster ride of sonic madness. This is some frantic stuff this one but the sound effects and music are seamlessly blended together coming and going without notice and the production is absolutely brilliantly executed and is dizzying to the mind how long it took to blend all these sounds and musical outbursts together so well. Generally speaking the thirty short tracks which start with some kind of cartoonish sound effects are either inspired by or directly borrowed from various sources including Warner Bros and other Carl Stalling creations and then morphs into energetic speed sludge hysteria. Mike Patton only creates wordless vocalizations which seem to take the lead in directing the rest of the band to follow.

There are all kinds of different rhythms, moods and sound effects streaming at the speed of light throughout this one but if you are already familiar with Mike Patton’s other works including the other FANTÔMAS albums you will hear familiar ideas only tweaked to be even weirder than before. This is a hard listen at first (and second and third!!!) but if you embrace the extremely demented creations of maddened genii then you might appreciate this one. This exists in a universe that few will dare to tread but for those who do be warned that even though you will find hummable melodies galore, the franticness of this wild concoction will demand multiple listens to get the gist of.
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