After years of living as a rumour, Mike Patton has finally unleashed his Peeping Tom project. Firmly rooted in hip hop and overcrowded with special guests, the first of two planned albums is disappointingly average. The album has its peaks and troughs; granted the highs are high indeed but too much of the disc is kooky hip hop by numbers.
When I first heard the Peeping Tom album I thought it was great. I listened to it several times in a row, marvelling at how Patton had nailed what good pop should be. I then took a break from listening to it for a few weeks and when I went back it had lost a lot of its sheen. So Patton hasn’t quite nailed perfect pop, it should get a listener involved every time. Most of the songs are average with moments of brilliance. For example on “Don’t Even Trip” there is little of interest throughout the song, the music is passable but the vocals are dull apart from the superb chorus (which starts with a lyric that has Patton written all over it: “I know that assholes grow on trees but I’m here to trim the leaves”).
“Five Seconds” is a strong and promising start to the album. The music is groovy and instantly accessible (not a quality much of his music has possessed). Patton’s singing is user friendly but peppered with a few curveballs to keep me on my toes. It’s nowhere near his best work but as a pop song it works, if more songs sounded like this on the radio I might consider turning the damn thing on. Unfortunately they don’t sound like this and even the rest of the album doesn’t keep to the same level of quality. For every decent song like “Your Neighborhood Spaceman” and “Kill the DJ” there is a “Getaway” and a “Caipirinha.” Apparently Patton has enough Peeping Tom to make two albums but he would have been better making one album using the best of both (provided there are more good songs among those not yet released).
I don’t know what I was expecting Peeping Tom to sound like but I was expecting better after the amount of time that has gone into bringing it about. I know it wasn’t meant to be challenging like Fantomas but I thought it might be less middle of the road. Guests like Kool Keith who I expected to bring a lot to the table were a disappointment. On the other hand, Patton has teased out some good sounds from Massive Attack (who gave up being interesting a long time ago).
When the album finishes with “We’re Not Alone” I am reminded of why I like Mike Patton. I like the vocal gymnastics and sense of adventure that many of his other projects are full of. Ironically these qualities are absent from this last song (and much of the album), it is more in the vain of Faith No More who were boring and far too safe. I hope once Patton gets this return to mediocrity out of his system and comes back with something new to blow me away.
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