I'd say this album was designed more to showcase his band: The Exalted Intergalactic Super Wizard Guild. It consists of multiple guitar players, a mandolin player, a flugelhorn player... and I'm not knocking getting creative with different instruments necessarily, but I'm sayin': there's basically two songs with proper rapping on here. In fact, there's only eight tracks total, about half of which are instrumentals. Looking at the track-listing, you might ask why are there only three on side B, until you realize the "12 Minute Guided Meditation for Courage" is really a twelve minute guided mediation for courage. I mean, it's a lark. He tells us to "fart into the sun; we are healing the world." But it's twelve minutes of softly spoken meditation terminology and I believe the technical term for this kind of instrumentation is noodling. That's an incredibly long way to go for a goof. The kind of sensibility that would pull such a stunt is also a part of Jones charm, but it's a big ask no matter how you cut it.
So let's skip to the good stuff. One of those aforementioned instrumentals, "Your Funeral," has a cool Hip-Hop energy, with an 80s orchestral vibe and a lot of DJ scratching by Kostas Kantzouras. Unfortunately, this is the only song he does any on. And the album's opening track shows he can still put together clever wordplay in elaborate multis ("haphazard capacity for massacres; scavengers scattered with one 'Abracadabra'"), though he occasionally gets a little too 90s punchline-y for me ("colder than a toilet seat in the shade of a glacier").
The other rap song is "Greatest Man Ever," a sort of a play on EST I suppose, telling the tale of the time the greatest man ever walked into a saloon and all the outlandish, exaggerated things that made him so great ("universal magnetic embodied; somebody said he battled the devil and got an apology. Got a degree in chemistry and also biology. People followed him like a shaman callin' him awesome. Made daffodils blossom in the middle of Autumn; walkin' on top of the water, none of it would get on him"). And that's pretty much where I hop off this ride.
"A Fly Flew Into My Car" is almost like a little stand-up comedy routine delivered as a spoken word poem set to music (and yes, it's literally about a time a fly flew into his car). Fun, but I don't know if it has the replay value. I said in my Wonders Beyond Belief review that "[y]ou've just gotta skip around" for the good stuff. Now you specifically have to microtarget the precise minutes. To frame this in Whistle terms, you couldn't Transformations this situation; we're in strict Always and Forever territory here.
If this sounds like it might be up your alley, Mirth and Mayhem is out now on a single LP with great sound and comes in a full-color picture cover. It looks like the same artist as last time, and I have to say he does a great job of capturing the spirit of Jones' music: festive, eccentric, a little old world-y. But if anybody wants my advice: let your DJ scratch on more than one song.
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