Faith No More: Classic or Dud

they were a fucking septic cyst at the base of the regularly-flaccid cock of heavy metal back in the 90s. i only hope the viral nastiness contained within their best grooves will ultimate choke the living shit uot of the big-shorted cunts who stole their sound and left their intellect, their creativity, their grandiose sense of the ridiculous and their utterly hateful sense of morality cowering in a corner.

That 'Big' Jim Martin was an ignorant redneck puts me off the band a little though he sure as hell hit the buttons when they get it right (that he compliments Roddy on the synths so well surprises me since apparently he couldn't hack Bottum's sexuality) but anything post Angel Dusk is unlistenable shite... Hmmm, thinkng about it, I think I am a victim of a nostalgia trip when it comes to these boys...

Anyway, 'Faster Disco' is the absolute joint, can't get enough of it man - that breakdown and the way they build it back in again with those la la vocals hits me where it hurts, but in a good way.

And with Patton, I'm up for From Out Of Nowhere and Land of Sunshine (what is it about their lead tracks?), although Everything's Ruined is the one off Dust.

Only just seen the terrific I Started a Joke video:

haha @ "Michael from Barnsley"

Hey, we're Faith No More & we're reuniting for a tour. Sorry, but we have absolutely no intention of setting foot on US soil, kthxbye.

Guy who wrote the article is a cloth-eared Bungle/Fantomas-hating philistine but I am even more amped for Crank 2 now

wtf I can't believe I missed Chuck Mosley show up and perform with FNM in SF this spring.

http://faithnomore.kungfustore.com/system/photos/assets/3360/3360-medium.jpg?1278963215

Listening now to the We Care A Lot album for the first time, something I never did at the height of their fame or anytime since. It sounds very "1985," but in ways that don't make it seem 29 years old? I dunno. FNM is/was a weird band that despite sometimes clunky songwriting, often dated production and general corniness manages to escape the era in which they existed pretty cleanly.

I still prefer Patton as the singer over Chuck Mosley, but this shit's great.

http://www.metalinjection.net/av/faith-no-more-reveal-2-new-songs-live-at-london-gig

I'm trying really hard not to build up my hopes over the possiblity of a new album now.

Get the Motherfucker On the Phone (I'm assuming that's what it's called) is pretty damn catchy.

I knew they were new!

They were just killer on Friday.

I became a fan last year after watching this vid, posted somewhere on this borad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZfr2QMk3Fc

Realllly want a US tour.

Seriously! Still kicking myself for missing them last time.

they'd better come to canada this time

New song posted:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/premieres/hear-faith-no-more-first-release-in-17-years-motherfucker-20141119

I fucking love it.

me too

You fucking wrote it you mook. (Well not the song, but you know...)

It's cool, can't help but think it'd be better if Patton did the verse vox as well though.

I love the downward spiralling outro.

this is way better than i ever would have expected

also is the dude on the right jim martin???

err far left i mean....stage right! (good cover ums)

Not Jim Martin. They hate him. Which saddens me.

Yeah but bit of a homophobic prick by all accounts so fair enough on their part.

I have hope this will be a rare not completely boring 90s rock band reunion record

Playing guitar with Infectious Grooves instead of Faith No More seems like proper punishment.

I have a certain degree of faith (pun intended) in the new album; the new song is solid, and Patton's been on decent form recently (the latest Tomahawk album is terrific).

also is the dude on the right jim martin???

It looks to me like Billy Bob Thornton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_iNK0mBKrQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b2OHDIEwQs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bV0QnVIiZk

I remember watching this live and laughing so hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-4CcgA1Upo

There was a stretch of time when FNM were my favorite band, and I love all of the Mike albums to varying degrees. That said, not totally sold on the new song.

Just spent the morning watching this incredible show when I should've been working. No regrets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-WvTieSyEI

Puffy is such an awesome drummer.

I didn't like the last Tomahawk album, but I kind of like this. I can imagine it wearing thin quickly, but it's still a hell of a lot better than I expected.

This new song's getting some shit but I rather like it, especially if you take it as an intro track as intended rather than a lead single or something. I'm not the hugest FNM fan but I'm still pretty excited for the new album when it drops.

got my ticket to the Atlanta show. who else is catching this tour?

HOLLA :D

20th in SF

There used to be video of this somewhere that I've probably posted before, but I saw the tour in Philly in 1992 (Helmet opened), and at the end Patton invited the crowd on stage, where they proceeded to grab just about anything not nailed down.

Aw, looks like whoever posted in on youtube back-when deleted their account. And now it is lost. Sad!

the angel dust tour remains the only time I've ever seen FNM live

i distinctly remember patton doing a standing back flip.

He was rolling around the stage like Sonic The Hedgehog at the Phoenix Festival in 1993.

Im a huge FNM fan. Seen them a lot and encountered them in the bay. Billy Gould is the coolest dude alive and should get more credit for the band. Roddy and Puffy are rad folks too.

I mean, I know I've heard Angel Dust lots of times but I don't think it's necessarily more remarkable than King For A Day.
There's loads of mad shit going on in that last album - Ugly In The Morning and Cuckoo For Caca especially, but Evidence is super atmospheric, Digging The Grave is a great single, as is Gentle Art Of Making enemies. There are maybe a few too many ballads and loungey moments, especially towards the end, but I just love the whole dusky gothic city atmosphere

Puffy's an absolute sweetheart, the beating heart of that band.

xp Angel Dust is a towering masterpiece and the end of FNM's Imperial phase, KFAD is an okay record from a band who were running out of steam for various reasons

is kind of how I break it down to an extent

yes, agree

I liked KFAD more than I liked Angel Dust when I was 14-15. I now think it's way inferior. There's too much filler on there and the heavy songs sound too produced & typical. The magic isn't there like it was on Angel Dust.

Album of the Year weights way too much to the typical & produced side, but "Last Cup of Sorrow" and "Stripsearch" are great mid-tempo FNM songs. Mike can sing, he can scream, and he can be really annoying.

KFAD is still my favorite. I don't know how good big jim ripping thrash guitar would have sounded that deep into the '90s. They needed something more taut and streamlined and still got pretty experimental with it — an attitude that carried over nicely to AOTY and Sol Invictus. That's also really the album where Mike becomes the Mike we know today, turning his voice into a diverse instrument of croons and screams outside of the naturally schizophrenic Bungle setting.

'Smaller and Smaller'
'Malpractice'
'Caffeine'

All rely pretty heavily on that dynamic, w/r/t Mike's voice.

Only problems with AOTY - the songs are there, but Hudson is faceless as a guitarist, decent riffs but doesn't really do much more than a weak imitation of Jim Martin in broad strokes, and the bass playing is very subdued and pedestrian.

But I love "Stripsearch", "Ashes to Ashes", "Pristina", and "Collision" a lot.

I prefer it to the reunion album even though Hudson sounds more comfortable on the latter.

Evidence  is super atmospheric

It always reminds me of Ghetto Heaven.

KFAD is still my favorite. I don't know how good big jim ripping thrash guitar would have sounded that deep into the '90s. They needed something more taut and streamlined and still got pretty experimental with it — an attitude that carried over nicely to AOTY and Sol Invictus. That's also really the album where Mike becomes the Mike we know today, turning his voice into a diverse instrument of croons and screams outside of the naturally schizophrenic Bungle setting.

― kirsten gilla band (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, September 21, 2023 6:08 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This, yes - his voice is incredible on this album in so many ways

It always reminds me of Ghetto Heaven.

― lurch of england (ledge), Thursday, September 21, 2023 8:23 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Haha yes!

I gave Angel Dust a listen last night and it might need another listen but Patton seems a lot less present in the mix on a lot of the songs on that one

Yeah I think this is why Angel Dust never quite clicked for me any time I tried listening to it after loving KFAD as a teenager.

Patton is such a weapon on KFAD and his vocals are VERY prominent, like the main feature of that record. I put AD on and I'm kind of waiting for the thing to properly kick in cos his voice is so buried under the guitars and other instruments.

This is going to sound bananas to anyone holding this up as the last bastion for FNM, but to my ears it's a transitional album where they're still working out where to go; still leaning into 80s classic rock and Cali-funk; yet to fully embrace the smoky lycanthropic atmospheres I love about the follow-up.

In summary: Small Victory vs Digging the Grave - seriously, is there a competition here in terms of which has the most teeth?

But it's what you're used to I guess, and this might be the classic thing of "the one you hear first".

I would love to hear an alternate mix of AD with Mike's vocals given a bit more prominence over Jim's starting-to-become-dated guitars

In summary: Small Victory vs Digging the Grave - seriously, is there a competition here in terms of which has the most teeth?

I mean, Digging The Grave is astonishingly linear and predictable, like a Helmet song with an opera singer over the top. It has a gutteral punch, but... Small Victory is circus organs and rave samples and sirens and stuka bomber riff runs and pop rap and wild croon and a million other different perverse levels and collisions. It has more ideas in four minutes than most albums.

I've been leaning in harder here than KFAD deserves, partly because I found it SO disappointing BITD. There's a lot to commend it - Ugly In the Morning and Cuckoo For Caca are thrillingly visceral, Just A Man walks that insidious tightrope where you're not sure if they mean it, maaaaan, or are lampooning that kind of overdriven balladry. But Angel Dust always seemed a mad masterpiece to me, the sound of a band who could conceivably do anything, and are hurtling in a million sick directions at once. That's the thrill for me, that one song could be a Tom Waitsian character portrait, the next could smoosh rave music into thrash metal, the next could be a macabre subterranean epic about wanking, and it could close on an aching John Barry cover. And there's still nothing on KFAD as genuinely unsettling, upsetting, terrifying as Jizzlobber.

After AD the unstable element is jettisoned, the friction, the discomfort. The danger.

I think they probably lost that element of danger when Jim Martin left- even though by all accounts he had checked out even during the recording of Angel Dust they probably needed the grit in the oyster that was his presence. But who knows? Often bands have it, then it goes, and Martin leaving may have been correlation not causation.

Fascinating to hear different perspectives on this though, I'll have to go back to KFAD and give it another go, I was disappointed at the time it was released too. FWIW I like Sol Invictus a lot, a solid record with the odd moment that transcends that description.

Small Victory is circus organs and rave samples and sirens and stuka bomber riff runs and pop rap and wild croon

I'm hearing something different to you then. (And I've heard this one many times as it was on the best of that came out in the 90s). I'll give it another listen

Points dismissed to KFAD in that the second side has a long string of parodic ballads and throwaway mid-tempo jams that don't do much for me. The opening 8 or 9 songs are gold tho

Maybe it's just the production on AD not lighting things up for me then. Small Victory is a fairly straightforward mid-tempo rock song to my ears. But now you mention it Stevie, yeah I hear the elements you mention but everything's just totally blown-out and the rave samples are so deeply buried in the mix they're hardly audible.

I like the visceral howl of Digging The Grave. Yeah, no rapping or rave samples, but I mean, the first Korn album had been released by then so

that one song could be a Tom Waitsian character portrait, the next could smoosh rave music into thrash metal, the next could be a macabre subterranean epic about wanking, and it could close on an aching John Barry cover.

Haha, at first I read this and thought you were talking about KFAD. Same could apply really. Maybe not the smoosh rave though, no. It doesn't have the wild'n'funky thing they'd done on previous albums - it was a much smokier, almost jazzy affair

the rave samples are so deeply buried in the mix they're hardly audible.

They're all over "It doesn't bother me / no" bit of the chorus! The production's fine, DL, I think it's your ears that need squeegeeing!!

i don't really hear any samples in that chorus but whatever, I love that song and Martin's guitar playing is a major reason why. I feel like he's not getting the credit he's due here. Yeah he's a metal guitarist, but he's not a wanky player, he has a really great command of tone of melody, everything he plays adds another dimension to the songs which is just gone after he left.

“Everything’s Ruined” lights up over a 15-second Martin solo. He absolutely contributed to what’s so great about that album.

The stuff that bores me on KFAD are the tracks like “Star AD,” “Take this Bottle,” and others I can’t think of currently. They’re fine songs, but they’re not what I’m looking for when I listen to FNM. I guess the unpredictability is part of the appeal, but I prefer the madcap nature or “Be Aggressive” to weird genre exercises.

Maybe the difference between my feelings about KFAD and some on this thread are that I never felt disappointed by KFAD when it came out. It didn't sound like a band running out of ideas to me - if anything it sounded like it had more elements of Disco Volante-era Bungle than Real Thing era FNM. As Martin's guitar work on AD is being underrated by some; so is Spruance's on KFAD. My one criticism of KFAD is that it's a song or two too long. I have this complaint about many CD-era albums that came out around that time. I would have been fine with them dropping "Take This Bottle" which I almost always skip.

I agree about "Star AD", but the song has grown on me over the years. "Take This Bottle" less so.

I love the guitar work, and solo, in "The Last to Know" so much.

I like Star AD a fair bit. Take This Bottle is... a kind of dull and overlong attempt at doomy country balladeering, yeah not essential

It makes me wonder really where FNM sit between themselves and Mr Bungle. Most of us, it's safe to say, come to Bungle for the madcap genre-fucking spectacle of it all, which is part of the appeal of Angel Dust it seems. So where does that leave Patton's FNM other than a more trad version of Bungle?

They're two different bands

They are, but don't you think Patton's fascinations had a huge influence on both bands (not to mention his other projects)?

I think there's the manic Naked City/Zorny every-song/sound-is-different side of Patton, but he's also into prolonged genre exercises (as is Zorn, sometimes, too). Exotica, Morricone soundtracks, lounge music, etc. It's been a while since I listened to many of his albums, but iirc the prolonged exercises often lacked the zip I wanted from him. "King for a Day," imo, sounds more akin to that stuff, less unhinged, more steady/disciplined, maybe.

I think Bungle was a bunch of friends from nowhere California growing up on the same influences and molding them into a sound, and FNM was 4 or 5 guys throwing their own unique backgrounds and obsessions into a bowl and seeing what comes out

Yeah, Bungle always seemed more like a team/gang. FNM, I don't know much about the individual dudes, how divergent were their tastes and backgrounds?

Like iirc when I talked to Billy, he told me that he basically sent the "Another Body Murdered" recording to Mike to do his thing on it and got back all those screams and was like "You sure this is what you want to do?" and obviously that's the version we hear today

Yeah, Bungle always seemed more like a team/gang. FNM, I don't know much about the individual dudes, how divergent were their tastes and backgrounds?

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, September 22, 2023 2:55 PM (nineteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean, Billy and Roddy were teenage punx who grew into post-punk, Puff liked Ozzy but all three of them were intrigued by rap and electro emerging in the early '80s, Jim was obviously a metal dude who was buddies with Metallica, Mike came from Bungleland which was basically bizarro thrash metal then Boingo ska then Zorn kitchen sink nuttiness and then he spent the Angel Dust press cycle basically trying to get people to listen to Hanatarash and Kids of Widney High

The disparateness is what makes them such a unique and special band

i think of patton as having a bigger creative force in bungle than he does in FNM.

Another Body Murdered is so savage.

Roddy and Billy went to high school together in LA

Xp it really is. 30 years on and it still sounds genuinely dangerous

Patton's ooohh-ah-oohhh bassline is the perfect stage-setter for the boo-yaa voices, he absolutely shouldn't have come up with a verse