California

I'll start this out by saying I don't do drugs, smoke, drink, or any stupid shit like that. I don't want it, and I don't plan on ever wanting it. It's very ironic then, to think that one of my favourite albums of all time was probably recorded by a bunch of men high on LSD.

The first track on the cd, "Sweet Charity", starts the album on a creepy, soft note. It's easy to picture Master Patton singing in the rain, dressed in a suit with a cigar and a top hat. It sounds like a mixture of easy listening and jazz, therefore meaning it's really soft and is extremly coherant (unlike any of the band's material up to this point). The previous insanity is only barely hinted in the chorus. Other songs like "None Of Them Knew They Were Robots" and "Ars Moriendi", are more like what one would expect, they feature extreme genre changes. We also have "Pink Cigarette", which seems to be in more of waltz/jazz territory, with Patton's voice alternating between a low baritone voice and a high pitch falsetto one. There is one big suprise here, and that is "Retrovertigo", which is literally the only normal song Mr. Bungle ever recorded. It's the only one that sounds like it could get anywhere near a radio, and had the band released it as a single, this album and this band would be much more popular.

Patton alternates between high pitched falsetto singing and low baritone vocals, and very rarely screams (something the band employed into the majority of their early material) and also doesn't rap a single line on the whole cd. All the genre's the band previously attempted, most notably funk, are gone (exept for Death metal, which appears in a handful of songs), instead replaced with jazz and pop and basically anything soft. There are still heavy moments, but they're in small numbers, unlike the first albums which would typically have songs that featured metal as their main focus. I'd say I can see "Golem II" being on "Disco Volante", as it reminds me of a more serious version of "The Desert Search For Techno Allah", and I can see "None Of Them Knew They Were Robots" fitting on the debut, as it's one of the noiser songs (with all the samples and with the genre changing every 10 seconds), and it features Patton at his most diverse, as part of the song contains death growls and high pitched screaming.

I personally think this album is amazing. There is not a single thing about it that is negative, STRONGLY SUGGESTED.