Mr. Bungle and Melvins' Sydney show was like playing an entire collection of music on shuffle in a haunted library. A blind date with multiple subcultures. Where things are going to get weird.
Saturday's gig (9 March) traversed a bewildering array of genres. It fragmented form and expectation. It was like your roommate got drunk and smashed your jigsaw puzzle: Everything is all over a dirty floor and it is hard to see how the pieces fit together.It disrupts all pretence of predictability. Post-postmodernism. Everything everywhere all at once. A series of nightmarish sonic montages that ricochet and erupt and disintegrate.
Ipecac Recordings described Bungle's eclectic and curious mesh of music: 'From ska to death metal to lounge jazz to the soundtrack of a movie that doesn't exist.'
It is cinematic. It is the stupid stoner comedy that you watch with your little brother on Sundays when it's raining. It's fart jokes and squeaky rubber chickens. It's 'Bungle Grind', 'My Ass Is On Fire' and 'Anarchy Up Your Anus'.
It's a slasher film and a 1940s musical. The rhythms are tap dancing on the ceiling; upside down, insistent. The covers are crooning; enveloping. The kitsch and the whimsy of Spandau Ballet's 'True' and 10CC's 'I'm Not In Love'.
The light in the venue changes; hues of cartoonish pink and purple. Suddenly we are all up in the fluffy, marshmallowy comfort of 'Grease' and Olivia Newton-John as Patton bellows 'Hopelessly Devoted To You' in a disquieting falsetto.
The persistent presence of thrash permeates the sound and grandstands during their cover of Slayer's 'Hell Awaits'. On drums the self-taught former roadie and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo played beats executed with blistering precision. His percussive style is, in its essence, consistently raw and electrifying. The grandiose flamboyance of '80s metal.
The line-up of Melvins' Buzz, Patton, Lombardo and Anthrax's Scott Ian was giving low-key super-band vibes. Sh.ts and giggles notwithstanding, this gig takes its hat off to seminal moments in the history of punk, pop, and metal.
True fans knew to leave expectations at the door and to leave bewildered. As Patton laconically informs us at the outset: "We are the blokes you cannot trust."
The gig was a thrashy, thumpy, gut-wrenching journey through Bungle tracks punctuated by a series of covers, from Slayer to Henry Mancini, Sepultura to Spandeau Ballet. In the track 'Hypocrites', "Habla español o muere" is substituted with Patton chanting in drone "Speak bogan or die".
The final encore was a seamless tangle of Sepultura's 'Territory' with the laconic chanting of "Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!" and the pervasive sense of discomfort that accompanied it. The anticipation of what was to come, and what came was a searing rendition of Sepultura's timeless song of rebellion, that wild fusion of resistance and metal and psychedelia.
Mr. Bungle is all the things. Avant-garde jazz lounge music. Gatsby with a grudge. A Loony Tunes cartoon, being smacked with a mallet of riff and rampage that leaves the stars twinkling and birds circling above your fluffy brain cloud. Carnicore. The punk freak folk came to town. Accidentally drunk at the circus. The sense of light and noise, bending and expanding and exploding. The carousel spinning too fast. Dizzying and disorienting. Lost in the mirror room and banging into your own broken reflection. Leered at by a hobo clown.
Time and genre are ephemeral, and some memories stick more than others. Maybe it is easy to remember the nightmarish as it is easy to recall the show tunes you watched as a kid.
The Melvins' gut-wrenching opening set, with its low-end OG doom riffs showed that maybe the stoner in stoner rock never leaves you. That Black Sabbath had it right all along. That regardless of age or decade, this stage held a group of consummate musicians. Somehow in its volatility and strangeness the music and the live show haven't aged.
Mr. Bungle was always a radical deviation from the palatable, easy-on-the-ear symmetry of the riffs of Faith No More, the breadwinner and one of Mike Patton's more commodifiable enterprises.
Faith No More was the day job, the one on paper, irresistible, predictable. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus. Circling back unto itself. Bungle was the night job, a late-night gig in a sleazy bar, strange hours, weird characters. A delirious fever dream played out in the margins of a theatre of discomfort.
Read our recent interview with Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn.
