Those who know Mike Patton best as the lead singer for anthemic metal pioneers Faith No More may be surprised to hear Fantomas's The Director's Cut; it's apparent that, post-FNM, his sympathies lay not in the punishing riffs of nu-metal, but in the most perverse reaches of the avant-garde. Fantomas brings together Melvin's guitarist Buzz Osbourne, one-time Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo and bassist Trevor Dunn from Patton's long-running experimental project Mr Bungle--a line-up that should suggest something of the pretension, eccentricity and pure gut-churning heaviness that appears on this, their cinematically-conceptual second album. The Directors' Cut consists of 15 bizarre interpretations of the scores to their favourite cinematic moments, from modern horror landmarks--see the sludged uptake on Angelo Badalamenti's haunting Twin Peaks theme "Fire Walk With Me"--to ancient birth-of-cinema classics--look to the grindingly heavy death metal reworking of Karl-Ernst Sasse's terrifying theme to The Golem. Guided by Patton's gliding falsetto, the cover of Henry Mancini's Experiment In Terror score could almost be Faith No More--but such palatable moments are few and far between on this occasionally inspired catalogue of punishing weirdness. --Louis Pattison