Mr. Bungle’s “Disco Volante”
In the late 1990s, music was easily downloadable but good music was hard to find. I was part of a curated online, uh, “music-sharing community.” I somehow ended up with a file called “05 Ars Moriendi.mp3.” It contained one of the craziest songs I’d ever heard. It sounded like music written and performed by a middle-Eastern disco cartoon circus wedding band.
There was no metadata, so all I had was the name of the file. This was before Shazam and iTunes, before everyone had an internet presence, and the best search engine at the time was AOL. So, it took a few years to learn that Ars Moriendi was a song by an American band called Mr. Bungle.
The song is the 5th track on their 3rd and final album, California. I bought the CD and fell in love with it, hauling it in my discman to high school for several weeks straight. It was super-polished pop-insanity. Flowers and butterflies and beach artwork complemented the precise and meticulously-crafted songs. So much fun with tons of diversity and completely unpredictable. I’d never heard anything like it.
Then I bought their previous album, “Disco Volante.” Not only was this album NOTHING like “California,” it was blatantly off-putting. It opens with a miserable dirge called “Everyone I Went To High School With Is Dead” that sounds like an untalented garage band recorded in a refrigerator box.
The rest of the album is a stream of consciousness highly-layered erratic barrage of doo-wop, bebop, metal, Looney Tunes, techno, screamy, surf-y, dreamy punk ska noise rock that’s extremely musical and sprinkled with lyrics in English, Latin, Italian, and gibberish. One of the songs is called “Ma Meeshka Mow Skwoz.”
“Disco Volante” offers a listening experience that makes you ask, “How did a major label like Warner Bros. release this?” and “Why am I still listening to this?” The first time I heard it, I just couldn’t believe it existed. It’s antagonistic at times and intentionally annoying, as though the band was on a mission to upset itself and others.
What I love about the album is its completely unrestrained creativity. It makes no attempt to be liked and even trolls the listener several times throughout. It’s messy at times, never beautiful, and a unique piece of art. If you like owning music that makes a statement, this is an album to have in your collection. If you’ve never heard it, I challenge you to set aside about 70 minutes to be undisturbed and listen to this in its entirety. You may not regret it, but you probably will.
