Mike Patton - Mondo Cane - 2010 - "...I don't need a landowner to harvest coffee."

Never one to get comfortable or to repeat himself, Mike Patton's latest effort comes to us in the form of 1960's Italian pop tunes, backed by a full orchestra, and sung almost completely in Italian.

If you are unfamiliar with Mike Patton, he gained fame as the frontman of Faith No More, and then went on to front a plethora of other projects (I briefly discussed this in a previous post), the multitude of which has defined Patton's artistic style ever since. He also lived in Italy for a few years, where he learned to speak Italian fluently. In what feels a bit like an homage to the country, the culture, the genre, or maybe all of the above, Patton assembled an all-Italian orchestra (65 members...no small feat), a Neopolitan conductor, and played three live shows to Italian audiences. The resulting live recordings were mixed and massaged in the studio, and ultimately released as Mondo Cane (that's pronounced Mondo Car-nay...go ahead and give it a whirl).

I know nothing in Italian. Undaunted, I plunged into this album with no external resources to guide me through -- I truly wanted to get irretrievably lost in translation. As it turns out, getting lost was quite easy, so I resigned myself to enjoy an album in a way I rarely do -- by emotional feel alone. I came out of the first few spins not overwhelmingly impressed, but pleased with the results. These are pop tunes, so everything felt inviting and catchy (especially the awesomely visceral 'Urlo Negro'). There's even one song ('Deep Down') that features some English singing (just those two words, but they do get repeated quite a bit). My prevailing thought after a few spins was that most, if not all of the songs dealt with love or chicks or something like that. I mean, these are Italian tunes after all.

Once I felt like I got the gist of things, I sought out translations to all of the tunes to see if I would enjoy the album any differently. 'As it turns out, 'mondo cane' translates to 'a dog's world,' and as Mike Patton recently stated in an interview about the album, 'If I really had to boil it down, [Monde Cane]’s about love and loss, heartbreak, and the triumph of suffering.' Sure enough, all but one of these songs (once again, the violently infectious 'Urlo Negro') deal with falling in love, hooking up, or breaking up. Reflecting back on my Italian-only listens, I also came to appreciate Patton's ability to sing with so much emotion in a foreign language. Even though I had no clue what he was so croony about the first few times around, as I suspected above, most of these songs deal in matters of the heart. But don't get me wrong -- these are not schmoopy saccharine love ballads. Yet Patton definitely infuses all of the songs with passion, so much that an English translation is not all that necessary to get an appreciable drift of what's going on. 

The end sum of Mondo Cane for me though, was that there were no hidden meanings to decipher in the lyrics. Learning the words in English ended up adding some flavor to the album, but was unnecessary for my listening experience. These are snappy little songs put together on an album that does not take itself seriously, but does manage to demonstrate some of the breadth and vigor that Mike Patton's voice possesses. There may even be a song or two here that would work perfectly on a Valentine's Day mix tape/CD/playlist. As for Mike Patton's future as an Italian balladier? Maybe so, but probably not. 

Orchestral Italian cover band? Been there, done that...on to the next project.