You certainly won’t offend any fan if you call heavy metal a conservative music. Large parts of the scene would probably even see this as a badge of honor. But it is just as reliable to say that metal becomes more interesting the closer you get to Dave Lombardo’s constantly expanding force field.
And that doesn’t mean the bar in Berlin-Mitte that is named after the legendary Slayer drummer. Even during his time with the Californian thrash metal band, he pursued his offbeat side projects, and since leaving the band, he has also been employed as a high-speed metronome.
On Wednesday, at Huxley’s Neue Welt in Berlin-Kreuzberg, you will find yourself in the immediate force field of Dave Lombardo, who has barricaded himself behind an impressive drum kit. Music magazines like Rock Hard used to call it a “shooting gallery,” but Lombardo is of course, even at the speed of a hummingbird’s wing beat, far too delicate a technician for martial vocabulary. Dave Lombardo and Mike Patton have been in an extremely productive partnership for over twenty years, which has produced, among other things, the phenomenal mathcore lounge tigers Fantômas.
Cartoon-Version von Deathmetal
This evening they are on stage at Huxley’s as the heart of Patton’s avant-metal supergroup Mr. Bungle. With Scott Ian, the last original member of the thrash heroes Anthrax, they have managed to gain another veteran from the camp of fast fingers. Living music history is gathered here for a performance that is truly music history.
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When Slayer released their classic “Reign in Blood” in 1986, Mike Patton was just 18 and still a few years away from becoming the singer for MTV superstars Faith No More. In the same year, he had just recorded the demo album “The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny” on cassette with Mr. Bungle in San Francisco, then the epicenter of American thrash metal. The demo album had little to do with the genre’s musical purity, and not just because of its grotty sound. It was more like a cartoon version of death metal: Patton played the whistle and bongos, among other things, while his colleague Trevor Dunn played the kazoo.
35 years later, Mike Patton came up with the idea of finally giving these historically valuable recordings of his now disbanded band their true purpose. To do this, he recruited Lombardo and Ian for new recordings alongside original members Trevor Dunn and Trey Spruance. And the album “The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny” released in 2020 revealed extremely contemporary thrash metal songs under tons of analog sludge and signal noise – minus prepubescent titles like “Anarchy Up Your Anus” – recorded by some of the best in their field.
And so on Wednesday the Apocalyptic Five stood on a stage in Kreuzberg for their only concert in Germany, and the first in almost a quarter of a century. Patton, of course, once again in his well-known role as the absurd fidget with a harlequin hairstyle and – indeed – a whistle around his neck.
And in front of him was a mixing desk from which he was able to coax the most catchy white noise. Patton was already the master of ceremonies in the Faith No More days, and this is not just because his instrument is his voice. His range still extends from beautiful crooning to bone-shaking death metal grunts.
Virtuosos in every musical genre
Even on Wednesday evenings, he conducts his band with his hands and feet, only occasionally surprised when this perfectly coordinated machine suddenly takes on a life of its own. Even in its heyday in the 1990s, Mr. Bungle was more of a musical cabaret than a serious band, although Patton and his musicians are virtuosos in almost every musical genre. He enjoys the role of the highly gifted individual who falls out of character with undisciplined behavior.
© imago/MediaPunch/IMAGO/Kevin Estrada
However, the racing Easter Bunny, who looks down from the stage as a background motif, has been bitten by the wild monkey. With Lombardo and Ian on guitar and drums, the band plays itself into a crazy rush of speed, where previously breakneck style and tempo changes were Mr. Bungle’s trademark.
Any other pace would be wasted in this fantastic supergroup. Basically, this evening you will witness a childlike regression: men in their late 50s playing the music of their youth. This is basically how every line-up of the Wacken metal festival could be summed up, if it weren’t for the irony mode that Patton can switch to at any time.
Starting with the painfully dissonant Wagner intro (“Zarathustra” as cat music) and a cover version of, of course, the Slayer hit “Hell Awaits”, which the band mixes with the Spandau Ballet ballad “True” to create a furious mash-up. Even the hardest metal fans raise their lighters in the air – in the middle of the mosh pit, of course.
Patton has always had a slightly perverse inclination towards the dark side of German culture. The competition with German “bad jokes”, for which the band members slip into the role of candidates in the middle of a concert, is one of the more harmless obsessions. After all, humor has never done any harm in the context of metal. Mr. Bungle even enriched the genre with musical humor, which – when it becomes very ironic – can quickly seem outdated. Actually, appropriate for an evening that gives forty-year-old songs a new lease of life.