99% of the time Delirium Cordia is a dismal album. consisting of a single song clocking in at a frightening 74 minutes and 16 seconds long, listening to it is not a practical exercise. you can't play it in the car, you can't play it for friends, and playing it for your parents would only conjure up the painful memory of your first return from college where you sported a mohawk, an all-leather outfit, and complaints about the wickedness inflicted upon the American proletariat. Fantomas is Mike Patton's more schizoid alter ego. throughout all of Delirium you're inflicted with ghostly spaces and awkward bells, midnight hums and clangs, and the peppering of them with double-bass, sneers, and sandpaper guitar licks. Patton himself croons and coos only to later bellow and cachinnate with a crushing evil. oh yeah...you also can't play this stuff at any birthday parties for anyone who considers being called vestal a compliment.

but there is a 1% of the time in which Delirium is utterly spectacular. my friends and i call it 'headphone music,' a time in which your sense of hearing overwhelms and even penetrates all the others. most people don't have the attention span to listen to headphone music because the sonic progression is too discomforting and non-linear. over-acclimated to the standard machinery of music-making--linear progression, breaks, observable differences in each piece--many will probably shun Delirium. i think Fantomas was aware of the average aversion but didn't care. after all, Director's Cut consisted of Metal Covers of numerous film scores including 'The Omen's' Ave Satani. anyone who listened to Fantomas didn't do so because their music was palatable or commonplace.

so far i've only listened to Delirium twice since i bought it 2 months ago. as previously stated, don't buy an album such as this for frequent listens, you'll only find yourself heavily disappointed. but there does exist a window of time in which your ears seek a fix unattainable through any items in your standard musical trove. Fantomas can relieve that craving for 74 minutes and 16 seconds.