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Fantômas - The Director's Cut CD (album) cover

THE DIRECTOR'S CUT

Fantômas

 

RIO/Avant-Prog

3.73 | 92 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Tristan Mulders
Prog Reviewer
4 stars Fantômas - The Director's Cut

I suppose unlike most people I never heard of Mike Patton before I heard a song of this Fantômas album.. That's right.. I must have been living under a rock; I never heard a single song of his world famous Faith No More band. I know, I'm a cultural nitwit...

So back to Fantômas then... It was actually here on ProgArchives that I first a song by this innovative project. It was the incredible cover of the theme song for the film Rosemary's Baby that really excited me to discover more of the same. This song is true to the original, yet it is clearly an own rendition by this talented bunch of musicians.

In the meanwhile I discovered more of Patton's musical escapades and I learned that he is quite the genius... He has this very typical sound and style of music. I also discovered that most of his music shares the same type of tendencies, especially vocal wise, just like on this song "Rosemary's Baby"... Either you have his dreamy clean vocals or you get his high-pitched 'screaming voice'... What's also pretty remarkable about his voice is that Patton uses it as an instrument as well on certain moments. Something else that I noticed while listening to Fantômas as well as those other projects by Mike Patton was that the man is not too ashamed of putting a bit of humour in his compositions...

Well back to "The Director's Cut" then. As you might have noticed already, the 16 compositions on this album are all covers of famous and lesser famous film soundtracks. To be quite honest, I love watching films and I've seen quite a bunch of them, but I was not really familiar with any of the ones included here... But that did not keep me from enjoying this album. Quite the opposite actually: after listening to this album over and over again, I began to get very interested in hearing the original scores to the films and I started searching the various films. I mean, I became a David Lynch fan mostly because Fantômas' cover of the Twin Peaks: Fire walk with me theme kept haunting me for days!

Fantômas recreate 15 (the one remaining track -#13- is just a few seconds of silence) film soundtracks in their highly original manner, ranging from still from spacey electro rock to trash metal and back... As I said before the vocals are pretty varied and this in combination with several extreme metal parts might make this album a bit tough to 'get into', but nevertheless I think it's one hell of a progressive effort nevertheless, so don't get fooled by the extreme short track lengths (at least short by 'progressive' terms)!

Tristan Mulders | 4/5 |

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