46. Faith No More / Album Of The Year. 1997. 2.5/5.

Following on from the tour that had promoted their “King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime” album, the band members all split up and continued on with their lives. It seemed that almost all of the band had side projects they were working on, and their schedules were crazy busy. Mike Patton was still touring with Mr Bungle while the others wrote and demo’d material for the new album, but when Patton returned and listened to it he claimed he only liked half the songs, and only felt as though he could sing on half of the songs. If it had been me I would have suggested that if he had been around for the writing process perhaps he’d have felt better about it! From here guitarist Dean Menta was fired (Billy Gould suggested it wasn’t his playing but his writing which contributed to this) and Jon Hudson was hired to replace him. However, Bordin went off to drum for Black Sabbath, Roddy Bottum went off on tour with his side project Imperial Teen, and Patton went off to join his wife in Italy, while Billy Gould went touring Europe for 4-6 months. In the end the album was dubbed the ‘miracle baby’ as it was a miracle anything was recorded.
The album began being recorded in early 1997, though the band was never all together to do so, with members coming in at different times to record their parts or learn new songs that had been written in their absence. And the long absences between the points where all of the band members were in the studio at the same time helped to produce rumours that the band was on the point of separation. These were rubbished by the band at the time, but the somewhat haphazard way that the album had been compiled gave the impression that the group was on limited time.

It is interesting to me that this album has been coined as both a ‘heavy metal’ album, which of course Faith No More have never been labelled as doing before, and a ‘latter day grunge’ album, something else they have never done before. Indeed, trying to label this album as any particular genre is a futile gesture. It’s just a typical out and out strange arse Faith No More album, which is the best way to classify it. The first two singles are perhaps the most accessible songs on the album, which is no doubt why they released them as singles, but even they have their strange quirks about their composition. “Ashes to Ashes” made top ten in Australia, but the follow up “Last Cup of Sorrow” did not have the same effect, and sank in most markets. Given the success of the band in Australia – this album did go to number 1 on their charts – the lack of success for the singles can perhaps be seen to be directly related to the way the band wrote for this album compared to the preceding album.
The songs overall are slower than the band has produced before. The tempo in about half of the songs sits in the slow crawl category, occasionally intensified by a burst of energy either from Patton’s vocals of from a guitar riff. There is an experimentalist atmosphere throughout, that steals from different music genres without activating the best parts of those genres. There are punk tendencies without the speed or pure anger that the best punk bands expel. There are heavy metal riffs that don’t ring through true because they are held back in the mix so as not to have the songs fully integrate that part of the music. Bordin’s drums sound like they are about bust out and really take control at times, but they refrain from breaking out of the bubble and instead hold their pattern within that.
This is not to completely criticise the songs here, but to point out that there has never felt as though there is any rhyme and reason to the tracks on this album, compared say to “The Real Thing” and “Angel Dust”. Those albums flow, they don’t have to sound the same all the way through but they flow from one song to the next. This doesn’t have that. And the overall sludgier pace of the album tends to hinder that as well. There are songs like “She Loves Me Not” that I’m not sure really appeal to anyone in the band’s audience. It sounds like it should be a Stevie Wonder song. And if it does then they probably won’t like the follow up song “Got That Feeling” because of the opposite end of the spectrum it is at. In the long run, with hindsight, perhaps it is easy to be critical and suggest that the method of writing and recording the album may have brought about this haphazard way the album moves between moods and pace. Whatever it is, it is certainly a ride of some description.

I have loved Faith No More since I was first introduced to them back in 1989, and I saw them on every tour from that point on, right up until this album. I bought this album in its first week of release, and had it rotation for about a month, and then it slipped back onto the shelves. My opinion at the time? Well, to say I was disappointed would have been accurate. I’d seen them twice on the previous album’s tours and the band was still great live and all of the songs from that album sounded awesome live. This album was far enough removed from that, that I wasn’t sure just where my enjoyment for it stuck. The band then toured later in 1997 and I saw them at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney that night... and, wasn’t shocked so much as... bored shitless. The band was rigid, unexcited. The songs from this album were average, and they played cover versions of “Easy” and “Midnight Cowboy” and “I Started a Joke” and “This Guy’s in Love With You”. It was so far from the other gigs I had seen them play over the years it just wasn’t funny. I walked out feeling ripped off, and that was pretty much what I felt about this album too. I felt everything had changed, and that the band just didn’t have their heart in it anymore. And as it turned out, this was exactly the case, as they eventually went through with the break up of the band. And I know at the time I felt that was the right decision, because if “Album of the Year” was the best that they could come up with at this time of their career, then it was time to have a little rest and see if they could do something else on their own.