Judging from crowd reactions at last month's Faith No More concert in Toronto, the band's signature song is no longer "Epic", the star-making, stagedive-launching anthem that thrust the band's 1989 album, The Real Thing, into the Billboard Top 20. No, the most apeshit response was reserved for the lead single from 1992's notorious, radio-repelling Angel Dust, "Midlife Crisis"—which made sense, given that the majority of Faith No More's audience is now old enough to have gone through one. But if the moment confirmed the long-term triumph of Faith No More's artistic peak over its commercial one, the band weren't ones to bask in the validation. Just as "Midlife Crisis" was about to emerge from its brooding mid-song breakdown into its climactic final chorus, Faith No More deviously denied the crowd the opportunity for one last cathartic sing-along. Instead, they kicked into a spot-on approximation of Boz Scaggs' 1976 proto-disco perennial "Lowdown", over which frontman Mike Patton sang the remaining lyrics to "Midlife Crisis" in his most lecherous lounge-lizard warble.
It was a perfect Faith No More moment, crystallizing both their contrarian impulses and this ostensible hard rock group's long-time fascination with pop music. While it's common for metal and post-hardcore bands to pummel chart hits and golden oldies into submission, Faith No More have always seemed in awe of pop music's shimmering surfaces and disarming capabilities. As that "Lowdown" prank in Toronto illustrated, Faith No More don't cover soft-rock songs to make fun of them, but to make light of themselves, to deflate the chest-puffing machismo endemic to metal and unravel the tinfoil of hard rock's proverbial cucumber. And as these expanded, double-disc reissues of The Real Thing and Angel Dust reaffirm, Faith No More are a flamboyant, omnivorous pop act trapped in a metal band's body; their sound is the musical equivalent of a G.I. Joe doll dressed in a Barbie bikini with its limbs torn off. But if their reputation has been defined by a penchant for maniacal mash-ups, the band's deep-seated reverence for songcraft has always been the most perverse thing about them.
For younger listeners whose tastes were shaped by the genre-agnostic Internet, it may be hard to square The Real Thing with its reputation as an alt-rock trailblazer. Because, for the most part, what we largely consider alt- or indie-rock today was shaped by popular '80s UK bands—The Cure, New Order, Depeche Mode—who came of age with punk but used its principles to forge a synth-centric mode of pop music wholly liberated from rock's blues-based tradition. Their California alt-rock counterparts, while also raised on punk, were less interested in opening up a new emotional and sonic vocabulary than bastardizing their formative influences: think Jane's Addiction's goth take on Zeppelin grandeur, Primus' bizarro-world Rush revisionism, Fishbone's skewed ska, or the Red Hot Chili Peppers' mosh-pit updates of Dylan and Stevie Wonder. It speaks volumes about the conservatism of mainstream American music at the time that all a rock band needed was some slap bass and dyed dreads to get consigned to the "120 Minutes" set.
Amid their funky-punky peers, however, Faith No More were the freaks who didn't quite fit in with the other freaks. Neither as overtly sexual as Jane's Addiction or the Chili Peppers, nor as wilfully weird as their Bay Area buds in Primus, their lineup represented a veritable Breakfast Club detention room of rock archetypes, fusing elements of metal, prog rock, hip-hop and new wave. And it's that last element that ultimately set the band apart—through the omnipresent textural gloss of keyboardist Roddy Bottum, Faith No More were the only band of their ilk to openly embrace the synth-shined sound of '80s UK pop, then considered the antithesis of underground American rock. (Even as late as 1992, Rage Against the Machine were boasting in the liner notes of their debut album that they used "no synthesizers, keyboards or samples" as an unassailable measure of their realness.)
Faith No More's third album overall (and second to see wide release via Slash/Warner), The Real Thing is the moment where the band's seemingly incompatible aesthetics locked into seamless formation. This can largely be attributed to the arrival of Mike Patton, whose sing/scream vocal gesticulations better personified the manic contradictions in the band's sound than outgoing vocalist Chuck Mosely's bratty monotone. But the band were also more confident in the grandiosity of their sound, with bassist Billy Gould and drummer Mike Bordin's heavy but dextrous rhythms deftly mediating between Bottum's synths and Jim Martin's thrash-schooled shredding. The hair-raising intro to "From Out of Nowhere", with the entire band hammering at full throttle, is to this album what "Ride of the Valkyries" was to Apocalypse Now, a full-bore battle cry blown up to widescreen scale. And while "Epic" was perfectly timed to satiate the then-burgeoning appetite for rap-rock, the most interesting stuff was happening outside of Patton's staccato verses: that bulldozing fanfare of an opening riff, the beaming, anthemic chorus, Martin's Brian May-inspired soloing, that mournful, fish-killing piano coda.
But while The Real Thing represents an important chapter in Faith No More's history, there's a reason why the album barely registers on the setlists of the band's current tour: a lot of it is hard to extricate from its date of origin. And that's a function of both its connection to a long-past funk-metal zeitgeist and the band's own subsequent development. It's hard to imagine any band, let alone Faith No More, attempting another song like "Epic" today, not just because of lingering associations between rap-rock and Rapestock, but the fact that the vocabularies of hip-hop and rock—once united by a shared affinity for booming breaks and crunchy riffs—have expanded and diverged in vastly different directions. However, Patton's long-abandoned MC moves aren't the only thing that marks The Real Thing as a definite product of 1989. While the dubbed-out title track centerpiece and the explosive "Zombie Eaters" (a template for the sort of stentorian power ballads FNM friends Metallica embrace on The Black Album) serve powerful displays of Patton's melodic/monstrous extremes, he had yet to fully emerge as the hydra-headed vocal dynamo we know him as today, while the unnecessary note-for-note cover of "War Pigs" is a rare instance of Faith No More approaching an obvious influence in an obvious fashion. (At the very least, it provided Bordin with good practice for his future gig as Bill Ward's understudy.) And in spite of showcasing Bottum's crucial keyboard work, pop songs like "Falling to Pieces" and "Underwater Love" didn't do much to dissuade skeptics who had pegged Faith No More as Chili Peppers copyists. The band's next album, however, would ensure no one ever confused Patton with Anthony Kiedis ever again.
Angel Dust was hardly the spiteful act of career suicide their nervous major-label minders at Warner Bros. anticipated—it actually cracked the Billboard Top 10 and went gold in the U.S., while selling loads more in Europe. But in a post-Nevermind era when the stakes were growing ever higher for alt-rock bands—particularly ones following up a platinum-seller—Angel Dust asserted Faith No More's willingness to stay in the game, but only if they could play by their own rules. And they were as eager to upset the expectations of industry execs clamoring for another MTV-ready hit as the metalheads in their base who were just showing up for the megaton riffage. What makes Angel Dust an eminently fascinating record is not the fact that a band on the cusp of greater success would deign to release an album with songs called "Crack Hitler" and "Jizzlobber" that were just as ugly and filthy as their titles suggest. It's that Faith No More's most wantonly subversive album is also their most gorgeously rendered.
Unlike other alt-rock opuses of its vintage, Angel Dust didn't feel like a mere Lollapalooza-era update of '70s classic-rock gatefold epics; this was a new, fiercely modernist form of heavy rock music, painstakingly constructed from emerging strains of electronica and sample-based production, international influences and the depths of underground metal. (At the time, the aesthetic shift was extreme enough to drive resident hesher Martin out of the band.) Though retaining the heft of The Real Thing's weightiest tracks, the riffs and rhythms were slowed down and contorted into mostly unmoshable forms, while Bottum's synth arias—which imply the presence of an orchestra with a single keystroke—project nauseated grandeur. Patton's always been cagey about explaining his lyrics, but the overwhelming feeling of Angel Dust is one of America rotting at the core, numbed by TV and overindulgence, overrun with bigoted deadbeat dads, wracked with domestic unrest and psychological turmoil. "Does life seem worthwhile to you?" Patton asks on the opening "Land of Sunshine", amid a nightmarish flurry of creepy carnivalesque laughter and hammy infomercial pitches—and the bleak landscape catalogued on Angel Dust doesn't give you much reason to answer in the affirmative.
But Angel Dust's unpleasant imagery is countered by Faith No More's most audacious and playful musical experiments to date. There is the chanted "Midlife Crisis" mid-section that sounds like it was imported from an Enigma record; the pretty pan flute-inspired melody of "A Small Victory" that leads to a funky Madchester organ break; "Be Aggressive"'s appropriation of high-school cheerleader songs into a homoerotic oral-sex anthem designed to be unwittingly shouted out by the band's mostly straight fans. They're the sort of ideas that sound ridiculous on paper, but are perfectly integrated into the album's elaborate design. Likewise, "Everything's Ruined" should be the mess its title suggests, shifting through a bright, bass-popping groove, melancholy verses, a rap-metal bridge, soaring soft-rock chorus and David Gilmour-esque guitar solos; instead, this portrait of familial breakdown proves to be the album's emotional center, with Patton's dejected declaration of the title chorus coming just as the song finally opens up into a sweeping, piano-inflected vista.
Faith No More followed up Angel Dust's conceptual complexity with their simplest gesture: a straight-up, I-can't-believe-they're-not-being-ironic cover of the Commodores' 1977 slow-dance standard "Easy", which was recorded during the album's sessions but held over for the Songs to Make Love To EP. (It would be absorbed into the tracklist of overseas Angel Dust issues, but really does not fit thematically with the album at all.) "Easy" would crack the UK Top 10, and, to date, it's Faith No More's last single to chart on the Billboard Top 100 in the U.S. However, its significance to the band's story is somewhat overemphasized by this reissue, which includes three very similar versions of the song. The current archival campaign was not initiated by the band, but rather the music's current rights holders at Warner/Rhino, who are capitalizing on renewed back-catalogue interest stemming from Faith No More's first new album in 18 years, the self-released Sol Invictus.
Both The Real Thing and Angel Dust come appended with an extra disc of period-specific bonus tracks (pared down for the double-vinyl editions), however, Faith No More's high standards of quality control mean the vaults weren't exactly teeming with treasured leftovers. Aside from solid Real Thing-era outtakes "The Cowboy Song" and "Sweet Emotion" (not an Aerosmith cover, but a dry run for future Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey soundtrack entry "The Perfect Crime"), Faith No More's castaways tended to take the form of tossed-off genre exercises, like Zeppelin III-style acoustic interlude "The Grade", polka parody "Das Schutzenfest", and an Elvisized take on the Dead Kennedys' "Let's Lynch the Landlord". The rest of the bonus bounty comprises alternate takes (including some amusing time-capsule examples of early alt-rock dance remixes) and live tracks that don't deviate all too much from the originals, save for Patton's tendency to ad lib House of Pain, Bay City Rollers and Rob Base lyrics into his own.
But the unhinged atmosphere of Faith No More's early-'90s concerts provides a convenient yardstick for gauging just how far the band had evolved in three short years—from the metal-damaged misfits comically growling "SATAN!" as "War Pigs" enters meltdown mode, to the cinematically minded aesthetes who opted to close Angel Dust with a meditative rendition of John Barry's Midnight Cowboy theme. At the time, that choice felt like the biggest WTF gesture on an album full of them, all that crushing brutalism and shape-shifting chicanery anti-climaxing in a moment of pure, unblemished beauty. But the move feels more appropriate now than ever—after all, like John Schlesinger's film, Angel Dust was a source of outrage at the time of its release, but has since ascended to the realm of a modern classic.
