Faith No More: Classic or Dud

Mike could guest on You Suffer!

BRUSH WITH FAME, Faith No More edition: A friend and I went to the Ted Leo show in Cleveland (for the 25th anniversary of local venue the Grog Shop). While we were there we ran into a woman we know who works at the restaurant in our office building, and she introduced us to her boyfriend of three decades, who happens to be Chuck Mosley. He was really cool, hung around and chatted with us for a while after the show. He also got on stage with one of the opening bands, Falling Stars, and sang "Every Day Is Like Sunday."

Thats awesome!

wow!

chaki just played a show with Mosley! I didn't make it though as I was out of town.

Ah, that is pretty neat!

yah he was the coolest

Mosley apparently passed away yesterday?? wtf RIP

The Mosley family statement reads:

After a long period of sobriety, Charles Henry Mosley III lost his life, on November 9th, 2017, due to the disease of addiction. We’re sharing the manner in which he passed, in the hopes that it might serve as a warning or wake up call or beacon to anyone else struggling to fight for sobriety. He is survived by long-term partner Pip Logan, two daughters, Erica and Sophie and his grandson Wolfgang Logan Mosley. The family will be accepting donations for funeral expenses. Details to follow when arranged.

;_; very sad news indeed

Saw this version of the band in '87. They were fun, a little dorky, but in a good way. Opened for Red Hot Chili Peppers w/ Hillel Slovak. Disappointing news.

Awww fuck. RIP.

Bill Gould seems like a great guy and this film sounds really interesting
https://www.kerrang.com/features/district-unknown-rockabul-faith-no-more-bill-gould-interview/

touring with Korn and Helmet(!!)

WTF I don't want to deal with Korn or see this at the shoreline ampitheater and also we don't get Helmet in the bay area so fuck this tour.

The best thing about this band was it felt like 5 guys who all wanted to be in different bands

i love that they existed

Me too

like the math of how you get Roddy, Patton & Jim in the same band is insane, let alone Mike & Bill

The best thing about this band was it felt like 5 guys who all wanted to be in different bands

ha, great way of putting it. I recently did a relisten of their 90s albums and the friction is definitely what makes them interesting to listen to

Watching old videos and thinking about that ums post:

In "Epic" and ESPECIALLY "We Care A Lot," you can see obviously that Billy/Roddy/Mike/Chuck are all total hams — Puff less so, but definitely "game." And throughout there's Jim, who just seems stoic and stubborn and like he never wants to play along, but that becomes its own kind of "straight man" routine that's funnier than the 3 or 4 wacky guys surrounding him. Just an insane dynamic, total inversion of the Limp Bizkit/Killswitch Engage/Rammstein trope of the One Wacky Guy by having a band of four Ernies and a Bert

untapped band name right there btw

Man, Four Ernies and a Bert really nails it.

Still love when I saw them in 15, they performed in all white dress outfits, and there were massive amounts of flowers on the stage.

And stagehands periodically kept bringing more, and more, a ridiculous amount of flowers at the front of the stage.

It was like an I Love Lucy bit. Great humorous way to set up the show

Also literally the only Angel Dust song I didn't get that I wanted was Kindergarten but could not complain

Caffeine was massive

This is my favourite band I only really know one album well by. And that album is King For A Day, which I've loved since I was a teenager.
I mean, yeah, I have heard other stuff of course - I have a memory of borrowing The Real Thing from the library back in the day, and I'm sure I've heard Angel Dust a bunch of times at people's houses.
But I know very little of the pre-Patton material. I can't believe I'm only digging into it now. Not sure I agree with people who prefer the Chuck Mosley era - I wouldn't call him an amazing singer. But 'R'n'R' off Introduce Yourself is FANTASTIC.

Gonna work my way through their catalogue this week.

I love the Chuck Mosley era. I think he was a unique frontman and poetic voice. The Introduce Yourself and Real Thing eras of FNM overlap stylistically, since it was mostly written while Chuck was still in the band. See here this early version of The Morning After with different vocals and lyrics by Chuck. Those two albums are my favorite, with a nod to King For A Day, Fool For a Lifetime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_ND0ECI5-0

A few weeks ago, I watched Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey and fell in love with Perfect Crime again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yxCsKtBjdU

Not having Angel Dust and being a FNM fan is like being a Beatles fan and not knowing Revolver...get on it! It is their towering career highlight, IMO.

Angel dust is legit one of the best 90s albums, not just a good FNM album.

I'm sure I've heard Angel Dust a bunch of times at people's houses.

weird flex but ok......

whenever I hear the rap bridge of Welcome to my Island by Caroline Polachek. I get massive Chuck Mosley vibes.

lol I think someone would know if they heard "Angel Dust." Background music it ain't.

Weirdly, Faith No More is one of a handful of acts my wife and I seem to enjoy equally, but tbh I don't think I've ever heard much of the early stuff (aside from "We Care A Lot"). And another confession is that I've never been able to get into "King for a Day." Dunno why, maybe fewer hooks? Maybe I'll give it another shot today.

King For A Day is a bit gruelling tbh, though I love Ugly In The Morning and Cuckoo For Caca.

I can't really get into anything after Angel Dust. they are fine and I've listened to them but they never stick with me.

The first two FNM albums are great, though tbh I prefer Patton's live versions of As The Worm Turns and Mark Bowen.

Listening to "King" now and it's objectively good, or at least not bad, but it's missing something, imo. Sounds kind of conventional, relatively speaking. But then, anything would sound conventional after "Angel Dust."

Trey's guitar is pretty grey compared to Big Sick Jim Martin's work. When I interviewed them a few years back, Roddy was pretty explicit that his heroin addiction, exacerbated by his friend Kurt Cobain's death, meant he was pretty much checked out for this one.

Trey is technically a much better guitarist, but that sort of misses the point. Though I just hit "Caca," and that one hits the spot.

Trey is technically a much better guitarist, but that sort of misses the point.

Agreed. You don't want intriguing textural experiments and modernist metal minimalism, you want ludicrous dayglo extravagance to match the other soundclashing elements.

doesn't really have to be an either/or approach. Jim's problem is he was unwilling to expand outside of a very limited scope, whereas the rest of his band actually weren't boring heshers. his contributions were actually great on all of the albums, but he was never going to go along with anything else they did outside of 'thrash metal with keyboards and funk bass' after Angel Dust, and he's still kind of a dick about it in interviews.

KFAD wouldn't have worked with Martin, it works because of how oddball it is and yet it's still tuneful as hell.

the only FNM I don't really vibe much anymore is the reunion album. it got all this praise and all it sounded like was middling mid-album tracks. not 'bad' but I almost never want to listen to it.

not 'bad' but I almost never want to listen to it.

I'd second this, for sure.

xpost Hmm, I dunno. I don't think "King" sounds particularly oddball, just ... slicker? And that's largely the guitar to me, less thrash on top of weirdness, more jazzy licks and other (relatively tasteful) stylistic excursions that Martin had no interest in but also likely couldn't pull off. Iirc Martin felt sidelined (or sidelined himself?) during "Angel Dust," and that may be because for all the crunchy riffs, the guitar is one of the least essential ingredients of the whole stew, imo. Don't get me wrong, I love Martin, and the guitar is important, but I mostly love how he seems more of a supporting player, big power chords rather than noodles and wheedle wheedle. It's always been about the rhythm section for me.

Has there been a recent interview with him?

yeah i never listen to that reunion one, not since it was released

However, as an excuse to reunite, I'm down with it. I mean, it got us this nice surprise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_o9HLlqb4Y

King for a Day is okay, and I really loved it when I was younger, but Angel Dust is the original document--a once-in-a-lifetime album. Even though they got Spruance from Bungle on guitar it's way less weird than Angel Dust.

It feels more 'nu-metal' than Angel Dust. Angel Dust feels like a weird specimen by a divinely inspired band. That's a pretty meaningless description, yeah, but it's just got that ineffable artistry about it and I don't think their other albums have it.

I think they were always an unstable compound, and on Angel Dust the elements rubbed against each other in a singularly brilliant way. The Real Thing leans perhaps too heavy on the pop and metal sides of the equation, King is ugly and perverse, but not in a fun way, Album Of The Year is just kind of thick and claggy. The two Chuck LPs are their own thing, too - more innocent, more twisted, more of that pre-grunge thing before the alternarock sound coagulated and got too macho.

Album Of The Year is a truly underrated album.

xpost Wasn't Patton famously brought into the band with the album mostly done and like just a week or something to prepare his "Real Thing" vox?

Wallace quoted via Wiki:

All the music was written before Mike joined the band, which had gotten rid of the original singer, Chuck Mosley, and the tracks were either in preproduction or being recorded when Mike came in. And when he'd ask if he could make a section longer or different, the band would say "No, this is it, so you have to do it this way". So Mike Patton wrote every lyric and melody to that record over a ten to twelve day period. And it is stunning, because he was nineteen or twenty, and pulled all that out of the air, and put together an incredible record. The only thing we did was spend a couple of days at this coffee shop in San Francisco, because a lot of the songs were really dark and heavy lyrically, crazily so, and I would sit there and go, "Mike, these are some great lyrics, but we need to at least use some metaphor, or couch some of the concepts, but I think you've got some great ideas here". In the end, they really pulled some great songs together.