Millennium Monsterworks

Weird, wild, and sometimes wonderful, this live recording (deftly captured at Slim's in San Francisco on New Year's Eve 2000) is from bizarre underground "supergroup" the Fantomas, featuring Buzz Osborne of Melvins infamy and former Faith No More frontman Mike Patton, in this case, performing both Fantomas and Melvins tunes. The term "tunes" should be used loosely, as many of the album's 18 cuts are, as titles like "Musthing with the Phunts" and "Liquorton Gooksburg" suggest, exercises in musical oddity and excess. When guitarist-singer Osborne joins Patton (also of Mr. Bungle) in Fantomas, which features Slayer drummer Dave Lombardi, there's a cacophony of influences, from death metal to experimental to Black Sabbath. On Millennium Monsterwork, "Hooch" and the rumbling "Night Goat" from the Melvins album Houdini are included, as is "Mombius Hibachi" from Honky. "Cape Fear" and the gothic-into-punk-metal version of "The Omen," originally found on the Fantomas' Director's Cut album (full of bizarre reworkings of movie themes!), butt up against the painful noise of "White Men Are the Vermin of the Earth," the relatively straightahead raw rock of "Ol' Black Stooges," and the childlike spookiness of "Skin Horse." If Millennium Monsterworks is the ultimate in musical indulgence and esoterica, there's nonetheless a pleasing power and freedom to be gleaned amid the chaos. --Katherine Turman