I’m a lifelong card carrying member of Patton’s Satanic Army, so whenever he shows up for a guest spot on some avant-garde vinyl pressing, I’m contractually obligated to listen on repeat until my eyes glow red and my teeth fall out. So imagine my surprise this morning when I found three fresh tracks from Australian electronic outfit The Avalanches featuring Patton as a guest star. Even weirder, one of the tracks features Patton teaming up with former child star Haley Joel Osment, best known for his role in The Sixth Sense. What kind of sorcery is this?
Mike Patton Vs. Haley Joel Osment on a new music track is a sentence I never expected to scribble out today. The Faith No More and Mr. Bungle frontman has joined Osment on “Superfun!™ TVSpot,” one of three tracks featuring Patton on The Avalanches’ new album No Bad Memories. I was planning on buying some Halloween candy with my disposable income this weekend. Guess I have to spend it on this now.
The group’s fourth studio album, No Bad Memories, arrived October 16, and it has a whole lot more going on than your average guest-filled record. The Avalanches have built an entire fictional universe around old technology, exploring the strange way commercial jingles and obsolete gadgets get permanently lodged in our brains. Apparently, that universe needed Mike Patton popping in to yell about video games, too. I can literally feel his teeth snarling against my neck.
You can hear Patton and Osment together on “Superfun!™ TV Spot”, alongside the other two tracks featuring Patton, “Paradise Island” with Khadija Al Hanafi and “Total Recall.” Fair warning, though: two of the three are primarily interludes rather than full-length songs. Which is kind of a bummer and a blessing. I’m not so sure how adaptive I am to this unique listening experience. I’m not sure it’s going to be on constant rotation inside my camper. But it’s fun for Halloween.
The collaboration makes a little more sense when you learn how these two wound up on the record. The Avalanches, whose sample-heavy debut Since I Left You became a landmark of electronic music, have spent years building elaborate musical collages from sounds pulled out of unexpected places. On No Bad Memories, they’re taking that approach into the world of advertising and nostalgia by promoting a bunch of fake products.
Patton was a natural fit for one of the album’s strangest ideas: a fake video-game system called Superfun! The commercials parody the macho advertising that defined the console wars between Sega and Nintendo in the 1990s. Think loud, testosterone-fueled pitches for games and hardware, except the voice selling you the goods belongs to one of alternative music’s most unpredictable vocalists. Some even believe Patton to be a God, but there is no solid proof of that.
The Avalanches were longtime fans of Patton’s work. According to co-founder Robbie Chater, his voice was perfect for the concept, and some of the material Patton sent back was downright wild. It’s an inspired use of a voice that can sound equally at home in an aggressive rock song or a deranged character performance. That it lands inside an advertisement for a video-game console that doesn’t actually exist is a little too perfect.
Osment’s involvement came about differently. The actor, who became a household name after starring in The Sixth Sense and also appeared in Forrest Gump, was already showing the band some love on Instagram. The Avalanches noticed that he was frequently liking their posts and decided to reach out.
That invitation turned into a much larger collaboration. Osment stars in a 35-minute companion film for No Bad Memories, playing Ken, an employee of a fictional digital archiving company called Takumi. His job involves collecting people’s cherished possessions, including VHS tapes, CDs, cassettes, and photo albums, before things take a decidedly surreal turn.
The band had never made a film before, and they admitted they weren’t entirely sure what they were doing when they approached Osment. He signed on anyway, and the group credited his humor and calm demeanor with helping keep the production together. After working with him on the film, they also brought him into the album’s fictional advertising world, leading to his appearance alongside Patton on “Superfun!™ TV Spot.”
It’s an odd pairing, but that’s precisely what makes it work. Osment and Patton aren’t simply being thrown together for a conventional duet. They’re contributing to a strange little corner of the Avalanches universe, where fake commercials and fragments of imagined pop culture are just as important as the songs themselves.
And speaking of strange celebrity connections involving Mike Patton, there’s another former child star who recently had something to say about the singer. Corey Feldman discussed Patton on Jamie Kennedy’s Hate To Break It To Ya podcast earlier this year, explaining that he had originally considered asking the Faith No More vocalist to appear on his song “Paranoia (I’m Not Trippin).”
Feldman ultimately decided against pursuing Patton, citing what he described as concerns about alleged “cult” associations. During the conversation, Feldman made further claims connecting Patton to Satanism. Those allegations were not substantiated in the reporting, and Feldman’s account does not establish that Patton turned down the collaboration.
By Feldman’s own telling, he backed away from the idea. He later recanted his remarks. Some believe he said this because Patton turned down the Feldman collaboration. I have it on good personal intel that Mike only gave a thumbs down to “Paranoia (I’m Not Trippin)” because he was weary of Feldman as ThE LoSt BoYS star stole all his cans of Coke at a music festival last year. That’s all hearsay though (I think it’s true, wink.)
So while Osment is now sharing a track with Patton, Feldman’s proposed collaboration never got off the ground. That’s a rather strange footnote to a story that already involves a former child star and an experimental electronic group.
For now, you can hear the results of The Avalanches‘ far more successful pairing on No Bad Memories, available now. Just don’t go looking for a Superfun! console at your local electronics store. The commercials are fake, even if the people voicing them are very real.
As for Mike Patton’s odd Hollywood pairings, he’s also done songs with Ewan McGregor’s wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead on her indie-pop and trip-hop duo Got a Girl’s debut album. He also appears with Jack Black on one of Neil Hamburger’s albums. Yes. This is all true.
