Mr. Bungle Treat 'California' to Vinyl Reissue

BY Gregory AdamsPublished Jun 5, 2014

It's been 15 years since avant-garde metal weirdoes Mr. Bungle delivered their genre-jumping swan song California, and to mark the occasion, the record is being treated to a new vinyl reissue.

The group's 1999 full-length effort is being put back into print for the first time in years on June 23 through Music on Vinyl. The album had originally been delivered on CD through Warner Bros., but received a now out-of-print vinyl pressing 2010 via Plain Recordings.

The upcoming wax edition of California is being pressed on 180-gram vinyl, with the first 2,000 copies appearing on white vinyl. The package will also come with an insert.

Back in 1999, Exclaim! called California "even stranger" than their 1991 self-titled debut or 1995 follow-up Disco Volante, noting that the album blends thrash, noise and jazz sounds with a '70s pop influence. Vocalist Mike Patton had said at the time that this was the group's "pop" album.

"We never sat down and said, 'Let's make a pop album this time,' it just happened," he told Exclaim! "We write music individually and then we listen to each other's tapes. What happened was that we had somehow, cosmically, written similar sounding stuff: 'That's like a Neil Diamond song, wow, that one sounds like ABBA, cool, this could all work together.'"

In related news, Patton's Faith No More recently hinted at the possibility of new music coming our way.

California:

Side A:

1. Sweet Charity
2. None Of Them Knew They Were Robots
3. Retrovertigo
4. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
5. Ars Moriendi

Side B:

1. Pink Cigarette
2. Golem II: The Bionic Vapour Boy
3. The Holy Filament
4. Vanity Fair
5. Goodbye Sober Day

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