WELCOME TO THE BUNGLE
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE “THANKS” LIST on Mr. Bungle’s first demo tape, The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny, the Humboldt County, California, teenagers offer their fans, herein described as “demented geeks & skankers,” an all-caps message outlining their mission statement: “AIM TO CONFUSE!” This was all the way back 1986, and damned if they aren’t sticking to their word close to 35 years later.
When the group first announced they were getting back together in 2019, following a nearly 20-year hiatus, a much larger faction of loyalists was likely salivating at what kind of bizarre musical experiments the famously genre-splicing act would be getting up to next. Across three surprisingly major label-released albums, Mr. Bungle cross-pollinated violently shredded death metal with cocktail jazz, ska, doo-wop, exotica, surf, klezmer, funk and every other genre tag under the sun, often within the same number.
More than a few eyebrows must have been raised, then, when it was revealed that founding guitarist Trey Spruance, bassist Trevor Dunn and frontman Mike Patton were getting the band back together to re-record the brutal yet comparatively straight-forward thrash sounds of that first cassette, naming the update The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo. Add to that, the trio beefed up their current roster with two especially high-profile first-wave thrash figures — former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo and Anthrax rhythm guitarist Scott Ian. In some ways, it’s made for Mr. Bungle’s weirdest gambit yet.
While the members of Mr. Bungle have gone on to perform in countless eclectic projects over the past few decades — Patton most famously with alt-metal favorites Faith No More and more recently with hardcore supergroup Dead Cross; Spruance with his avant garde collective, Secret Chiefs 3 — at the heart of it, they’re metal lifers. Spruance and Dunn met in a high school music theory class in the mid Eighties. They bonded when Dunn brought in a copy of Anthrax’s Fistful of Metal, and Spruance ended up soloing over “Panic” for the rest of the class. The pair would merge their two bands — Spruance’s power metal-flavored Torcher and Dunn’s thrash-geared Fiend with Patton — to become Mr. Bungle.
Few musicians get to reform their teenage band, let alone with the same ferocity Mr. Bungle has brought to their latest. This isn’t a mid-life crisis, but rather a vital, vivisecting return that Spruance says gives Bungle’s earliest material “a fair shake.” For years, the recordings have only been available via the hiss of a 10th-generation cassette ripped onto YouTube. Engineered by Husky Höskulds and self-produced by the band, the new recordings deliver big-studio sheen without sacrificing the savagery. “Anarchy Up Your Anus” has been brought back amongst the living with Anthrax-grade gang vocals and determinedly chugging guitar rhythms. Armed with a recently acquired Schecter Evil Twin, Spruance dive-bombs his way through the three truly trem-bar-abusing lead sections on the frenetic “Raping Your Mind,” all the while backed by the punishing, down-picked precision of Ian, the possessor of one of metal’s most storied wrists.
