Fantomas - The Director's Cut

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Free Music Notes for The Director's Cut

Free Music Review: The Art of Restoration
Hit: 5 Stars

This is an album of movie music covers, mostly older horror films ("The Omen", "Rosemary's Baby" and the like). Just a couple of songs into my first listening of it, though, and my whole sense of the word "heavy" in heavy metal had already been altered. Musical styles changed before my ears, without warning, in ways I'd never heard before--superamped thrash death segued to stuff that reminded me of more psychotic versions of Alice Cooper's "Steven" trilogy, to spaghetti westerns and lounge music, to indescribable stuff. Vocals from lilting falsetto to Tasmanian devil scat. Guitars that made me realize Buzz Osborne is far more talented than I ever gave him credit (and I already give him a lot of credit). I sat, amazed and mesmerized, as music and what I understood as music were reinvented and renovated for me. This doesn't happen often, and I knew that I had found the coolest thing I would find for quite some time. (Which wasn't true...I got Fantomas' first album very shortly after.)

Other reviewers prefer this album (to Fantomas' first) because the songs are more song-like, which only exposes their own limited definition of song--a definition Fantomas as a band delights in twisting, abusing, turning inside out and so forth. Besides that, cover tunes will inevitably be more tune-like, since the originals are. Other reviewers constantly draw comparisons with the bands from which the Fantomas members have come, partly in order to characterise the sound, I suppose, but often with a note of disappointment. Fantomas is so much more than the sum of its parts that the parts hardly play into it anymore. One reviewer remarks that, as much as he likes the members of Fantomas' original bands, Fantomas kicks their [butt] soundly. This is exactly true.

Other reviewers complain that the swerve on this disc towards accessibility is an unhappy step in the wrong direction. Some have said that these covers are nothing more than parodies, which artists of Fantomas' caliber should not sully themselves by stooping to. Perhaps it would help to remember that Fantomas' debut was also a soundtrack (to a fictional comic book). It is, then, a perfectly logical step (not wanting to repeat themselves) to cover soundtracks for their second album. Moreover, the whole point of the debut was to rescue that [thing] of music (the soundtrack) from its second-class citizenship as a mere accessory to the visual content it accompanies.

Which is exactly again what they are doing by covering "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" and other soundtracks. And the technique they use, to borrow a term from literary criticism, is "defamiliarization"--the process of making the familiar strange, and thereby restoring it, renewing one's experience of the medium so treated (in this case music). Not that there is anything inherently inartistic in parody in the traditional sense (Papa Bach regularly parodied himself, for instance), but Fantomas' method here is not parody in any sense. For one, there is less humor on this album (their debut, by contrast, cracks me up over and over), but parody is not about comedy or humor either. Defamiliarization presupposes that there is something you are familiar with in the first place--namely, the songs from the movies chosen. It is an almost sure bet that most people will recognize one or more of the originals here, and it is from that point of familiarity (and the many radical departures from it) that one experiences again that thing called music. And even if you don't, the more conventional nature of the originals here will serve as the point of familiarity. The apparent step in the direction of accessibility, therefore, is a byproduct of the method, not its end. As surrealism warped the familiar in order to display the thing anew, so are these directorial restorations of soundtracks designed to make us hear music renewed.

As with most of the reviews of this album, I've avoided specifically describing any of the songs. Most simply say, "This is so and so's best album ever" and then point to a previous album as the aptest touchstone for what this Director's Cut is like. Well, I own the touchstone now as well (of course), but the comparison just fails. Besides which, if you already know about so and so, you don't need a review to be persuaded to buy this album. In fact, the main reason individual songs are not described is because they generally defy description, and because there are so many styles here that to describe one song seems to leave too many others out.

The bottom line is, apart from all this palaver about the intentions and meaning of the album, is that it's one of the heaviest, manicest, creepiest, -est albums I have heard in a long time. It hangs together in the same weird, hard to pin down way that Fantomas did. It's speed sludge-metal for people with brains, or at least that people with brains can appreciate. Right now, the only thing better to me is Fantomas' first album.

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