Mr. Bungle - California

In one of the first shots in Blue Velvet, the camera moves (with a few cuts) from the panorama of a mythic American small town to a close up of the swarm of milling insects hidden by one lawn's glistening, verdant surface. The sequence lends itself to textbooks as a description of Lynch's work in microcosm: the juxtaposition of seemingly non-compossible worlds to poke through the Capracorn crust and expose the noir core. There's a lie (at least one) that we've been telling ourselves, beating it home with movies and TV shows, and Lynch corrodes its foundation by introducing a darker strain of our film language to it like a phial of LSD to a city reservoir. The small town myth is shown to be as fake as a mechanical robin, but no less a necessary part of the small town reality than the robin is of the film.

An album that works on me in similar ways is Mr. Bungle's California. Bungle are known for pioneering, more or less, a style of music defined by cycling spastically through genres as though their boundaries had been erased, and California is probably their most restrained and sophisticated expression of this. Though no less eclectic than their previous work, here each song, and the album as a whole, manages to maintain its focus, changing sounds without altering the feel.

In conversations with my friends, I've singled this album out as among the darkest rock albums in my collection, but the reason why isn't immediately apparent: most songs have a saccharine surface structure reminiscent of the Beach Boys and rarely indulge in the agression or moody atmosphere that earn most labels of 'darkness' in music. But every song can turn at each moment from the Cali-pop base sheen to any number of genres' darker moments, or subvert it from within through the lyrics. When the glittering harmonies give way to manic yelping or thrash riffs, Bungle achieves for their home state what Lynch does for small towns. They show the child abuse hiding in the sea of green viewed from your passenger window as you drive north on the Pacific Highway, or that the City of Angels is also the City of Bukowski, gang warfare, and the base of the American porn industry. California, like small town America or anything else, is not just the shiny lie on the surface or the amorphous darkness beneath it; it's both together, and while everyone knows this about California in a time when every Hollywood stars' substance abuse and mental problems show like the organs of the Visible Man, this album makes the knowledge a tangible experience.

While the music moves in waves, lighter strands giving way to darker only to return again, without innocence, the lyrics often work against the music by highlighting and ironizing the typical hallmarks of a given genre. When the melancholy lost love ballad ends in suicide, the funky children's song turns out to be an updated version of the Golem myth, or the upbeat Motown gospel doo-wop lays out the theology of the Skopsi, a Russian sect who believed castration to be the only pathway to salvation, the irony is striking. When the lyrics don't introduce the extremes of reality into a comfortable and familiar fictional situation, they are written (usually by Mike Patton) along lines similar to those of the 'mad songs' of the Renaissance or Blake and the insane lyrical touches in certain songs by Roger Waters. Patton's vocal attack is, of course, appropriately schizophrenic.

So why does this all matter to me? Why is the only tattoo I have a lyric from (though not original to) this album? One answer is that I like art that presents competing views of the same base reality, especially when it suggests that every self-congratulatory silver cloud has, at the very least, its uncomfortably umber lining. Another is that I feel that the appropriate response to everyday madness is laughter of some kind. As a musician I appreciate the talent it takes to play so effortlessly through genres, and, more importantly, the skill it takes to compose songs that change styles like glasses, shifting the vision from Vermeer to Monet without changing its subject.

Finally, the album manages to do all this (and more; I'm not pretending to be comprehensive) while remaining fundamentally enjoyable on that gut level that music most quickly and fiercely attacks. Its funk is funky, its metal thrashy, its surf rock bouncy, and its ballads effectively sad. Where one would expect this kind of cerebral, deconstructive approach to produce arid and rarified results, the music is as verdant and lush as Bungle's Nor-Cal home and not over-analyzed in the least. It's alive with the enthusiasm for music that would manifest itself by this kind of encyclopedic approach.

It rocks.