The word for this album is bent. Musically it's detuned, rhythimically it's desynched, thematically it's deranged, nothing is a straight line, nothing done without extra angles and approaches.
The sound is generally loungey, with Mike Patton crooning in a way that kind of puts your teeth on edge, over sounds that just sound like they're coming from a dimension near ours, trying to mimic ours, but landing in some phase-shifted uncanny dissonant realm.
There are moments of true beauty, as Pink Chreschendo swirls and swoops towards heaven. But then, of course, in comes an arrhythmic beeping over the coda, effectively ruining the moment. It's as if Patton just can't help himself. He's like a kid at a ballpark when the PA announces a moment of silence, and everyone bows their heads. And the kid realizes, I can ruin this. I have that power, it would be so easy! And the kid hesitates. But then mistakes the will to overcome that hesitation as a marker of courage, and yells "poop!"
That's an overstatement - Patton isn't childish, in fact he's really talented. But he seems to make strange shit just for its own sake, and I'm not sure that that constitutes bravery. This album is really and truly headache-inducing, for no good reason.
Golem II works best, since it's nothing but playful noise, arranged gleefully, rather than used to subvert music. And there's Ars Moriendi, which swerves wildly from speed metal to soundtrack swoon to mariachi via klezmer, to everything in between so quickly that the seams blur to nothingness. It's a cool trick.
But when the album holds a note its almost always held against another note that it doesn't belong next to, grinding them together, hoping to sand them into place, to erode the listener's will to desire actual proper harmony and tunefulness. It's exhausting, and I can't hang with it except in the smallest doses 2.5/5
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