Mr. Bungle‘s influence extends further than their name recognition. They are best known for their trio of 1990s records, a distinctly weird, experimental collection. They began as high schoolers in northern California in the mid-1980s as a punishing thrash metal band. As they continued, they started to incorporate an array of other styles and sounds, releasing several demos along the way. From these demos, vocalist Mike Patton attracted the attention of Bay Area metal band Faith No More, who recruited him to join them. Patton kept Mr. Bungle going simultaneously, and Faith No More’s success for Warner Bros. Records allowed him to coax the label to sign Mr. Bungle. Somehow, Warner stuck with Mr. Bungle throughout the 1990s, making them one of the most non-commercial rock bands ever signed by a major label.
Their third album, California, was released on 13 July 1999. For its 25th anniversary, a reexamination of this unique record is warranted. It’s strikingly different from the band’s first two albums while still being recognizably Mr. Bungle. The group’s 1991 self-titled debut was a smorgasbord of styles. Most of the tracks top the six-minute mark and tend to lurch from one musical idea to another. A song can be rolling along in a bouncy ska style, then switch to crunching metal, then into free jazz all in the space of about two minutes. There’s a thrill to it, but with little connective tissue between the sections, the songwriting on Mr. Bungle left something to be desired.
1995’s Disco Volante found Mr. Bungle more focused in their songwriting while simultaneously more expansive in their sound. Here, tracks like “Everyone I Went to High School With is Dead” (doom metal), “Chemical Marriage” (jaunty organ), and “Desert Search for Techno Allah” (EDM with Middle Eastern flair) stick to a single idea. Meanwhile, “Carry Stress in the Jaw”, “Ma Meeshka Mow Skwoz”, and “Merry Go Bye Bye” take the wild musical shifts of Mr. Bungle into even more extreme territory.
In the interim, between their second and third records, the members’ musical careers outside of Mr. Bungle were very active. Guitarist Trey Spruance briefly joined Patton in Faith No More after that group’s guitarist departed. Spruance also formed Secret Chiefs 3 with Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Danny Heifetz and released their first material a few months after California. Patton, meanwhile, got all of his most esoteric ideas recorded. First, he created a solo project, Adult Themes for Voice, which is less of a set of songs than a collection of a cappella vocal sounds. Then there was Fantomas, an ensemble with Dunn, Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo, and Melvins‘ guitarist Buzz Osbourne. Their first album, an avant-garde take on metal that was even more out there than the first Mr. Bungle record, came out in 1998. Finally, Faith No More fell apart after Album of the Year was released in 1997 and received mostly shrugs from radio and MTV.
How much this influenced California‘s creation is debatable, but the result was easily Mr. Bungle’s most accessible album. That is discernible right from the start, as the opener, “Sweet Charity”, begins with seagulls and tranquil, tropical guitar. It’s a relaxed song, although it is in a minor key, providing tension. Still, Mr. Bungle fans, conditioned over the years, likely expected the other shoe to drop at some point in the song, taking off in wildly different directions. It never does. Sure, the song gets louder as it goes, and the arrangement brings in timpani and violins, but the mood and style stay consistent throughout the track.
That turns out to be par for the course on the record. Half of California comprises ballads, or at least slower songs. Each one is distinct, but they all share the trait of a single, focused style. “The Holy Filament” features an unsettling piano melody and layers of chorale-like vocals from Patton. “Pink Cigarette” is a classic, 1960s-style crooner ballad sung from the perspective of a person who never got the attention they wanted from their love interest. It ends with a deliciously macabre refrain. Patton starts with, “There’s just five hours / Left until you find me dead,” and each iteration counts down an hour, ending with “There’s just no-” followed by the sound of a flatlining heartbeat monitor.
“Retrovertigo” and “Vanity Fair” rank as the set’s best ballads. The former begins gently, with guitar and organ accompanying Patton singing in a soft falsetto. It expands into dramatic power ballad territory, with a powerful, catchy melody at its core. The latter features doo-wop backing vocals and is essentially a duet between Patton’s lead vocals and Clinton McKinnon’s tenor saxophone. McKinnon had done many things in the band at this point, but Mr. Bungle had never turned him loose to play an extended rock ‘n’ roll sax solo.
The other half of the record features uptempo tracks resembling earlier, wilder Mr. Bungle material. However, these songs flow noticeably better than their predecessors. That is the thing about the album. Whether it’s slower and focused or fast and loose, every song is good, and every song feels like a complete thought. California merges the band’s unhinged creativity with genuine attention to songwriting, which pays off hugely.
“The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” slides from slow Beach Boys harmonies to upbeat beach rock to crunching hard rock guitars and back without missing a beat. It also features a jaw-dropping surf rock section. “Ars Moriendi” is a demented klezmer meets metal combination featuring both virtuosic accordion work and incredibly hard-hitting guitars and drums. There’s no need to separate the styles here; by this point, Mr. Bungle had worked out how to mesh them together thoroughly.
“None of Them Knew They Were Robots” throws metal, rockabilly, and swing into a blender and comes out with a song that’s both completely over the top and fun. Big horns, wacky cartoon sound effects, organ, and a vast array of guitar tones all contribute to the effect. It’s essentially the band Diablo Swing Orchestra’s entire schtick encapsulated in a single song.
That has turned out to be Mr. Bungle’s legacy. Despite not being strictly a metal band, they showed that heavy metal could get weird and silly without losing the heaviness. The usual suspects of avant-rock, from Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa to John Zorn (who receives a special thanks on the band’s first album), all likely had a hand in influencing Mr. Bungle’s sound. Even Faith No More had a reputation for genre-hopping and doing whatever they wanted.
However, Mr. Bungle’s unhinged musical adventurousness can be heard in any number of acts that came after them. Progressive metal stalwarts Between the Buried and Me routinely throw in unrelated genre curveballs in the middle of their epic-length excursions. The Mars Volta famously had massive musical shifts in their “metal meets jam band” sound, while System of a Down parlayed a bit of Mr. Bungle’s wacky-heavy combo into mainstream success in the 2000s.
California finishes with “Goodbye Sober Day”, which includes many of the musical stops and starts of classic Mr. Bungle. Patton uses several different singing voices throughout the piece. Maybe most striking is the mid-song chant, which unleashes a choir of Patton voices at once. Once one sees the “Balinese Monkey Chant” portion of the documentary film Baraka, the movie’s influence on this song instantly comes into focus.
The guitar feedback and crashing sounds that close out “Goodbye Sober Day” were, for decades, the last thing Mr. Bungle recorded. They toured extensively to support the record, often doing two-set headlining shows. After their European tour wrapped up in September of 2000, though, the band went dormant. They finally returned in early 2020, playing a handful of shows featuring Dave Lombardo on drums and Scott Ian of Anthrax on guitar, with 1990s-era drummer Heifetz and saxophonist McKinnon nowhere to be found.
This incarnation of Mr. Bungle has focused on their thrashy first demo, The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny, which they recorded as a full, professional album and have spent chunks of the past four years supporting it. However, this version of the group remains stubbornly committed to being a thrash metal act. It’s a sadly monochrome sound for a band that were originally planning to name their third record In Technicolor before settling on California.