He may be best known as the front man of 90s rock giants Faith No More – who were always more than merely a rock band anyway – but Mike Patton’s musical career has been as varied as it has been long. Scratch that: it’s been even more varied than it has been long. The spectrum of music released on his own Ipecac label, which ranges from heavy-duty acts like Melvins and Isis to whacky experimental acts like Gangpol and Mit, is a fair indicator of the man’s wild eclecticism.
I doubt even his most hardcore fans love everything he’s released: his work with Fantomas and Mr Bungle may be pretty far out by most people’s standards, but is pretty tame – and sane – in comparison to releases like the solo album ‘Adult Themes for Voice’. That’s by no means to suggest that this is an album that’s anything less than immense both in terms of ambition and achievement.
The insanely prolific Patton’s latest solo outing is inspired by Paolo Giordano’s novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers and features music composed by Patton for the movie of the same name. True to eccentric form, the sixteen tracks aren’t numbered 1-16, but take the sequence of the first 16 prime numbers. Confused? The titles are ace: ‘Supersingular Primes’; ‘Radius of Convergence’; ‘Calculus of Finite Differences’. It’s more like reading the index or contents pages for mathematics PhD thesis.
|
Of course, what really counts is whether or not the music therein is any good, and with ‘The Solitude of Prime Numbers’ Patton’s delivered something pretty special. Grand – and often grandiose – widescreen cinematic orchestral arrangements are woven amongst the ominous rumblings and teetering tensions of the quieter passages that simmer but never quite settle. In the same way that JG Thirlwell’s more recent work has taken orchestral bombast to a new level, so Patton has created a work of a truly immense and spectacular scale, vast vistas and turbulent dramatics sweep then burst to stunning effect between moments of truly remarkable grace. It’s an album of shifting moods, of contrasts, and of movement.
Yes, it SOUNDS like a soundtrack – in the best possible way, proving that Mike Patton is a man who never stays still, who never fails to surprise, and who can be relied upon to deliver the goods, whatever he turns his hand to.
Mike Patton Online
|
