I need some new Mike Patton. Really, it’s been too long. I’ve been playing Peeping Tom over and over again, re-absorbing the whole amazing album and all it’s amalgamations of music, wrapped around the best goddamn voice in the business. But I need more…
A Perfect Place is awesome (movie and score incidentally) but it only goes so far to filling the void left by several years now without a new Patton-fronted band. I know he’s touring with a re-united Faith No More in Europe* and probably recording an album of bizarre vocal work on the bus in the down time but I’m entering a Patton free-fall and when that happens there’s no way of knowing how long it will last and what I’ll be like when I come out the other side.
It’s starting with Peeping Tom this time (I think I’ve listened to the thing five times today) but soon it will spread. I’ll be throwing on King For A Day, then Angel Dust will come to live in my car stereo. Next it’ll be the rest of FNM’s albums lugged with me to and from work everyday. Soon after this stage two will begin. My wife will come home three or four days in a row next week and find me sitting alone in the dark, maybe one or two candles burning and Fantomas’ Delirium Cordia playing so loud the neighborhood children** will be keeping clear of the nifty stairs right outside out windows that they love to skateboard on morning noon and night for fear that the nightmare sounds coming from the crazy guy’s place might infect their own little brains. After this it’ll be Tomahawk, Loveage (already started on that one actually) and my self-compiled B-sides and rarities discs, which I will obsess over for several days on their own.
And then, then the final step – probably a good month spent sitting on the couch whacked out of my mind with headphones on listening to the amazing production of any one of the three Mr. Bungle albums, most especially the self-titled. More specifically the absolutely amazing soundscape of DEAD GOON. You know, the end where you can hear the clown swinging from the rafters, panning back and forth from speaker to speaker, the tension in the noose taught and creaky enough to put the image of his brazeer-ladden corpse in your head, the image finally completed by the appearance of lipstick and a smarmy five-O-clock shadow as Patton sings ‘Floating, floating, floating a-way-hey-hey’.
And then I’ll have nothing but a few tracks on a number of John Zorn albums, the Milk Cult stuff, the Dillenger and Sepultura tracks he sang on and … oh, I know there’s more, I just can’t think of it. The point is there will be nothing new and that will make me cry for days.
Please Mr. Patton, don’t make me cry!
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* Have you seen the fucking set lists? Jesus Christ, I’m a stickler for the you -can’t-go-home-again theory but I never got to see Faith – for their last two albums they only played festivals in Chicago and both times I remember contemplating buying tickets and then figuring, ‘Oh hell, they’ll be back headlining at the Aragon or something’. Wrong! Asshole! Please tour the States you guys. PLEASE!!!
** One of them is named Koufax. I hear his parents yelling his name over and over again every fucking day, like some retarded mantra for summoning welfare checks and that goddamn ice cream man who sits in front of my place with his loud ass jingle-music and overheating refrigeration truck, blocking out my stereo, my telephone and often my senses. Fuck you Koufax.