Fantomas

How do you follow up an album that opened with the sound of a surgical saw cutting into someone's chest cavity? You make cartoon music, of course! No matter how hard it might try, though, Fantomas just isn't wired for levity, which means that Mike Patton and his hyperabrasive supergroup (Dave Lombardo, Trevor Dunn, and Buzz Osborne) take the whimsy and grace we normally associate with cartoons and grind them to bits. Strangely, though, the band doesn't dive head-first into the latent menace of cartoons, choosing its trademark made-for-ADD song structures as principal mode of impact. Of course, that's exactly what Patton fans want -- and this album will broaden horizons, even of the most inured listeners -- but it's hard not to see him as a musical fetishist who can get off only on weirdness. You'll get off too, but you might feel violated afterward.