Danny Elfman

★★★ Big Mess ANTI-/EPITAPH. CD/DL

Prolific Grammy and Emmygrabbing composer makes first solo album in 37 years.

Though he’s scored for movie directors from Tim Burton to Ang Lee, veteran Angelino Danny Elfman is perhaps best known as creator of The Simpsons’ theme tune.

Big Mess certainly has elements of anarchic satire too, its metal guitars, busy, fortissimo strings and industrial textures underpinning a politicised and darkly comic fury as he rages against Trump’s legacy (Choose Your Side) and compromised ardour (Love In The Time Of Covid). There’s a pleasing, Bowie-ish swagger to Elfman’s vocals and a steampunk thrust to Big Mess’s heavy, junkyard percussion, the album’s caustic, chaotic arrangements utterly fearless throughout 18 rather exhausting songs. The absurdist speed-metal of Kick Me – “Kick me! I’m a celebrity” – is the two-minute standout, while Insects, a reworking of a song by Elfman’s avant-garde ’80s outfit Oingo Boingo, packs astonishing punk punch belying his 68 years.