Fantomas - Delirium Cordia

There is an equation in music that deals with the inverse relationship of concept and listenability. If the concept on an album is truly innovative, then any difficulty in listening is negligible because the music experiments in areas that don’t have established guidelines or techniques to use as framework. If the album has no creative conceptuality in sound or lyrics it had better have tight production and listener accessibility, because it’s building on something that has already been done before. So… I always thought Mike Patton to be a mastermind of experimental audio. Whether it is the swing/jazz/rock/Japanese-chanting Mister Bungle album, California, or the first Fantomas record, Amenaza al Mundo (the most metalest of metal albums using beat-box in place of lyrics), I thought Mike Patton could get away with just about anything… until now. A single catastrophic decision spoils the entirety of the record. That decision: to make the album one seventy-four minute song (fifty-five minutes of content followed by nineteen minutes of vinyl static followed by a “one, two, three, four” count). Had Delirium Cordia been genuinely inventive in some way, as I mentioned earlier, the unfathomably annoying choice of making the entire CD one track would be inconsequential, a worthy sacrifice for the sake of experimentation. However, the album is twenty-four distinct tracks (I counted) sometimes with pauses in between, sometimes having other signifying elements telling the listener that a new song has started. Why make a single-track album that doesn’t flow as a single song? Cutting an album into multiple tracks isn’t an obstruction that confines artistic intent; it is a convenience for listeners and nothing more. Denying that simple convenience without a solid, innovative reason is both unnecessary and demeaning. Additionally, I feel that this album is a step back for Fantomas, having very little full band effort. The “quieter side of Fantomas,” as Patton labeled it, apparently means substituting real instrumentation with artistically inane sampling and stretching a decent twenty-five minute album into fifty-five minutes of repetitious, irritating noise (as opposed to good noise). Fantomas is still one of my favorite bands of all time (nothing can tarnish the beauty of their two previous releases), but I wouldn’t recommend this album to anyone at all. [www.ipecac.com]