Mike Patton brought Mondo Cane to Mexico for the first time with a sold-out Palacio de Bellas Artes, more than 30 musicians onstage and a set that began in the Italian pop of the Fifties and Sixties before finding its own route through Chavela Vargas, Mr. Bungle, Álvaro Carrillo and Juan Gabriel.
There was something faintly hilarious about looking around the Palacio de Bellas Artes and seeing Faith No More, Mr. Bungle and assorted corners of the Mike Patton universe represented on T-shirts across the seats of one of Mexico's most ceremonious cultural institutions. It was hardly the building's usual crowd, but nobody looked as though they'd wandered into the wrong room. Patton has spent decades, perhaps without meaning to, training an audience willing to follow him from metal and hardcore into whichever unlikely fixation he decides deserves an album, and last night that fixation happened to be mid-century Italian pop.
Mondo Cane has never been one of Patton's most frequently performed projects, which gave the show a sense of occasion long before anyone played a note. Years have passed since the concerts that eventually produced the 2010 album, and the possibility of seeing the project in Mexico had remained remote until Bellas Artes finally put it on the calendar. With the house sold out, more than 30 musicians onstage and Cheche Alara handling musical direction, the whole thing was large enough to become dangerously respectable, though Patton has never been particularly good at allowing respectability to hang around for very long.
The enormous glass curtain rose shortly after eight and “Il cielo in una stanza” began without any need for theatrical sleight of hand. Dressed in black, his hair braided, Patton stood among strings, brass, percussion, keyboards, guitars and backing singers, and within the opening passages it became obvious that the orchestra wasn't there to turn old songs into the usual prestige “symphonic” versions. Mondo Cane was built around these arrangements and depends on them completely: strings carry melodies, brass pushes songs towards widescreen excess and the percussion can alter the entire personality of a piece before Patton has even had the chance to do anything especially peculiar.
He didn't need to turn every song into an exercise in eccentricity. For much of the set he sang with an almost old-fashioned precision, leaning into crooner phrasing and a warmth that people familiar mostly with his harsher work might not immediately associate with him. What made it compelling was hearing that discipline gradually become infected by his usual habits: a syllable stretched slightly too far, a sudden shift in register, a growl dropped into a place no Italian singer in 1962 would have considered appropriate, or a facial expression capable of making an otherwise sincere romantic ballad seem vaguely suspicious for a few seconds.
“Urlo Negro”, “Ore d’amore”, “20 kilometri al giorno”, “Deep Down”, “Scalinatella”, “Storia d’amore”, “Lontano lontano”, “Dio come ti amo” and “Senza fine” moved through the programme without turning the evening into an illustrated history lesson on Italian popular music. That would have been the easy route and probably the dullest one. Patton knows the material well enough to respect it without preserving it in formaldehyde, while the musicians had enough room to keep all of its romantic excess and melodrama alive rather than treating the songs as tasteful period pieces that had suddenly acquired the label “vintage”.
Bellas Artes helped. The wide arrangements and cinematic sweep of the songs seemed perfectly suited to a room where even the curtain possesses more stage presence than a great many bands, although the audience kept proceedings from becoming excessively well behaved. Applause grew quickly, devil horns began appearing above the seats and the usual distance between stage and auditorium became noticeably smaller as Patton settled in. He didn't need to sprint around or pretend he was fronting Faith No More; his gestures, jokes between songs and habit of singing something genuinely beautiful while looking as though he might enjoy ruining it were more than enough.
“Balada triste de trompeta” began pulling the concert towards territory more immediately familiar to the Mexican audience. Franco Pisano's composition, widely known in Spanish through Raphael, sat comfortably inside a programme that had already made it clear nobody intended to reproduce the Mondo Cane album from beginning to end. There was also a growing sense that Patton had built parts of the evening specifically for Mexico rather than simply shipping in a concert that could have been performed unchanged anywhere else.
He spoke more than once about what being there meant to him. This was Mondo Cane's first Mexican performance, and Patton, usually so comfortable looking impossible to impress, openly admitted how extraordinary it felt to be singing at Bellas Artes. At one point he said he was close to tears. That might have sounded like ordinary tour-stop politeness had the rest of the evening simply carried on according to schedule, but the encore made clear that the connection with Mexico had been thought through well beyond the obligatory thank-you to the crowd.
After “Senza fine”, the musicians left before returning for a sequence that dismantled whatever remained of the idea that the night belonged exclusively to the Italian songbook. “La Llorona”, dedicated to Chavela Vargas, found Patton singing in Spanish without trying to conceal his accent or imitate somebody else's way of performing it. The song already carries more than enough history without another singer pretending to inhabit an authenticity that isn't his, and Patton approached it through his own voice, allowing the melody to do much of the emotional work.
The subsequent leap into “Retrovertigo” might have looked completely arbitrary on paper had this been anybody other than Mike Patton. One of Mr. Bungle's most melodic songs entered the set, and midway through it the Mariachi Gama Mil joined the ensemble, creating the sort of combination that in writing sounds like the product of a conversation someone should probably have ended by saying, “We'll think about it tomorrow.” It made considerably more sense in the room. The mariachi found a place inside the song's melancholy instead of turning it into a novelty, and the arrangement felt natural enough that the initial surprise disappeared within a few bars.
By then there wasn't much point in trying to categorise the show. “Luz de luna”, brought Patton directly into Mexican bolero and slipped into the programme without being introduced as some grand exercise in cultural fusion. After more than an hour of hearing him remove songs from their original contexts and rebuild them with another sensibility, it would have been stranger if he had suddenly started treating genre boundaries with excessive respect.
The opening notes of “Hasta que te conocí” were recognised immediately, and the atmosphere inside the room shifted with them. Until then, there had been an odd but entertaining coexistence between the discipline of an orchestral concert and the considerably less restrained reactions of people who had come to see Patton; with Juan Gabriel, much of that formality disappeared. People sang, stood up and responded in a way no Italian arrangement could ever provoke in Mexico City, while a mariachi accompanied an American singer best known internationally for helping make some of the strangest records ever to find their way into the rock section of a record shop.
The choice carried its own history. Juan Gabriel and Bellas Artes are inseparable from concerts that helped alter perceptions of who could occupy that stage and what kind of popular music belonged there. Patton didn't need to turn that connection into a speech before singing. The song, the mariachi and the room were already doing enough work, which is precisely why the moment never felt forced.
Far too much has been written over the years about Mike Patton's “versatility”, usually as though his career were some ongoing competition to establish how many different noises one human throat can produce. Mondo Cane is far more interesting from another angle. Patton is curious, possesses a monstrously broad musical taste and has very little patience for the notion that particular audiences should only be exposed to particular kinds of music. The same man who took Faith No More into arenas can stand in front of an orchestra singing Gino Paoli, move into Mr. Bungle and finish with Juan Gabriel without the evening collapsing into a collection of clever ideas searching for a reason to exist.
Mondo Cane's first trip to Mexico worked because it never seemed desperate to prove anything. The orchestra was allowed to sound enormous when it needed to and disappear behind a melody when it didn't; Patton sang exceptionally without treating every number as a demonstration of vocal range, and the Mexican material entered naturally enough to feel like part of the concert rather than a section designed to extract an easy cheer from the locals.
You go into a Mondo Cane show expecting old Italian songs rebuilt by one of the least predictable musicians of the past few decades. What was harder to foresee was ending up inside the Palacio de Bellas Artes watching Mike Patton, surrounded by an orchestra and a mariachi, singing “Hasta que te conocí” to a room that had given up almost entirely on the decorum normally associated with the building. Considering the career that brought him there, a conventional ending might actually have been the strangest possibility.
