Faith No More, Angel Dust (1992) A Review

Faith No More, Angel Dust (1992) A Review

Ghost Writer

Rock N Roll Animal

For me it was a musical lesson in anarchy, the best way not to be run over by success just as happened to Cobain years later, the best way to take full artistic control over your career, for sonic experimentalists Faith No More, Angel Dust was the best way they could continue the unexpected and immense success of The Real Thing, I was like 12 at the time of TRT and I remember my father hearing Epic and entering my room asking how was that possible that the guy was rapping over heavy metal music, well, Aerosmith, Anthrax and the Beastie Boys did it before, but not in such a seamlessly way, but for sonic experimentalists Faith No More, Epic was just the tip of the ice, it was nit a career defying moment but just the surface of something that went deeper, and contrary to making TRT 2.0, they returned nearly three years later with something completely different and yes, way better.

Angel Dust, in a more radical way than TRT, was a collision of too many things, yes, opening Land of Sunshine could be seen as an immediate link between the two records, another song mainly driven by Billy Gould punkish bass and Roddy Bottom's Angelo Badalamenti like inspired keyboards, it also had some of the circus vibe of Mike Patton's other band Mr. Bungle, and as an intro and link it worked wonderfully, as the record truly begging with the hard riffing of Jim Martin on Caffeine, with Patton finding his own voice and getting away from the Anthony Kiedis inspired gimmicks of TRT, it’s an inspired duel by Patton and Martin perfectly backed by Bordin who also plays some mean drums here, a dark and obscure rune with so much things going on in the background and some truly brilliant playing by Gould, with powerful heavy metal taking the complete spotlight here, but it's on tracks like Midlife Crisis were the complete new vision of the band is fully put on display, a total departure from the band previous recordings and a totally satisfying new direction, the band managing create a magnificent futuristic richly textured sound that would become hugely influential to bands like Korn, Fear Factory and Linkin Park and most of the subsequent "modern alt metal".

RV also shows some promise, although it starts as an almost insignificant tune, it slowly grows into something else, guitars and piano are brilliant, incorporating elements from lounge, Morricone inspired spaghetti western guitar and surf elements, with Patton exploring different range of voices in order to create some sort of characters and capture different emotions, but after this the band goes back to the futuristic metal with Smaller and Smaller, which here revels a certain inspiration from the impression Melvins, although the band is smart enough to integrate so many things within the same song, going almost epic here, and losing a bit of gas on the funky metallic "Curesque" Everything's Ruined, featuring some strange soloing from Martin, but the band quickly regains focus on the menacing almost extreme metal of Malpractice, one of the best pieces on the whole album even carrying some elements of black metal.

Not exactly Epic, but equally groundbreaking and addictive, Be Aggressive is without a doubt one of the central pieces of the record, taking elements from the RHCP but covering them on metallic riffing and Bottom timeless keyboards, this stuff is truly brilliant and iconoclast on a Frank Zappa level, with the band adding so much different textures and ideas all crammed on a single song, that sounds like nothing else you have heard before, without losing their pop sensibilities on the great A Small Victory, a song that should have been a huge hit.

 

Angel Dust was created as the antithesis of an extremely successful record, it was rude and crude on purpose, but it is done in a masterful way, it has an undeniable star quality and it shows a band coming truly into itself reaching the peak of its creative powers, and the most important thing, creating a sound, for some this could have turned into a career suicide, but FNM creates an odd, weird but inspired record that even surpasses TRT artistically, it was done 25 years ago, but it still sounds like the future and it was a brave attempt at perfecting something that already sounded great, even Brian Wilson had troubles when trying to follow Pet Sounds.