LOS ANGELES, CA- There are many names for a true musical chameleon mind like Mike Patton, but there are two things you can’t call his music: boring and repetitive. Patton changes his color once again with his latest album Corpse Flower (released September 13th, 2019 via Ipecac Recordings).
Corpse Flower is a collaborative album with Frances famed French composer and arranger Jean Claude Vannier, who has collaborated in the past with Françoise Hardy & Serge Gainsbourg. Like Patton, Vannier’s musicality is as eclectic and heralded as Patton’s. His 1972 debut album “L’Enfant Assassin Des Mouches”, is a wild exploration of musical genres and themes, and became the stuff of legends.
Vannier met Mike Patton at a Hollywood Bowl concert featuring Vannier’s work, and the two formed a relationship. As that old English idiom goes, “birds of a feather, flock together”, and Vannier began sending his music to Patton for his perspective. The result, Corpse Flower.
Corpse flowers are stinking flowers that emit an odor that smells of rotting flesh. It’s a humorous acknowledgment of the sonic oddities that are on the album.
Corpse Flower is not for the faint of heart. It is an album can be likened to Les Poètes maudits, misunderstood by some audience, but full of depth. “Ballade C.3.3.” starts this partnership off, with lyrics pulled from an Oscar Wilde poem narrated by Patton, melding Vannier’s grandiose, classic French chanson sensibilities, romance strings, a wayward accordion. The multifarious mixture of musical themes continued through the twelve songs and is a quirky mix of laid-back rock and classical music.
Musically this album doesn’t have a genre in itself, rather, it is an exquisite arrangement of Vannier’s themes. It’s what makes this album a piece of art. Very intimate, dark and lush, with multiple colors and high range voice tones that Patton achieves. All these variables make this album, a unique rarity, between lyrical quality, colors, and sound. Corpse Flower has turned this musical experiment into a kind of 81⁄2 of musical Fellini.
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