1253. Faith No More / The Real Thing. 1989. 5/5

Back in 1987 Faith No More had released their second studio album titled “Introduce Yourself”, the episode of which you can find in Season 2 of this podcast. It contained the song “We Care a Lot” which became a minor hit at the time and allowed the band an increased profile with which to tour places that to that time they had been unable to reach. However, during a tour of Europe through 1988, there were a number of incidents involving lead vocalist Chuck Mosley that caused disruption in the band, both on stage and off. At the release party for the album, Mosley fell asleep on stage as the band was being interviewed promoting the release. Then he allegedly (both parties have different versions of the event) punched bass guitarist Billy Gould on stage, and at one stage one of his roadies got into a fistfight with guitarist Jim Martin. All of this came to a head once the band had returned home from that European tour. Billy Gould, in a story published in Classic Rock in 2014, was quoted as saying, “There was a certain point when I went to rehearsal, and Chuck wanted to do all acoustic guitar songs. It was just so far off the mark. The upshot was that I got up, walked out and quit the band. Just said: ‘I’m done – I can’t take this any longer. It’s just so ridiculous’. The same day, I talked to Bordin, and he said: ‘Well, I still want to play with you’. Bottum did the same thing. It was another one of these ‘firing somebody without firing them’ scenarios”. It was similar to the same way the band had moved on from another former member some years earlier. If it works once, surely it will work again. And Chuck Mosley, just like that, was out.
In his place, the band hired Mike Patton, who at the time was singing with his high school band, Mr. Bungle. Jim Martin had heard their demo tape and urged the band to at least audition Patton for the role. When Patton came to the band, the music for the new album had pretty much already been completed and recorded. According to producer Mike Wallace, when Patton came in, he would occasionally ask if a piece could be extended, or changed, and he was summarily told “No, this is it, it’s done, so you’ll have to do it this way”. And then he went and wrote the lyrics for the entire album in a 10-12 day period, at the age of 21, having to fit the contours that had already been decided. An amazing feat, and to then sing them in the way he did, to help create what was this album “The Real Thing”, is quite an accomplishment.

For so many fans, this album was the first that they had experienced the band, and what better way to be introduced to Faith No More than the barnstorming opening track “From Out of Nowhere”, which blazes out of the speakers without warning and trips the album into overdrive from the outset. Energetic and browbeaten from the start, it is a killer opening, and surely impressed the fans who knew the first two albums with the onus on the new lead vocalist.
Everybody on the single’s release knew “Epic”, a song particularly well named for the way it sounded and the way it was treated on release. The video is mayhemic, and indeed created some controversy because of the vision of a fish out of water, flapping madly to breathe. But it was the manic energy of the track both on screen and on vinyl and CD that made it so popular, that drove the sales of the album because it funnelled the popularity of the single into people wanting to dive into the album itself and find out what else they could find. Surely no one left disappointed.
“Falling to Pieces” was also released as a single and is perhaps the most mainstream song that the band performs on this album. It is followed by the amazing “Surprise! You’re Dead!” which apart from being incredible musically must have been ridiculously difficult to write lyrics to fit to the music the band had written. In the end, it is triumphant. It was written by Jim Martin in a previous band Agents of Misfortune, which had also had Cliff Burton on bass guitar.
If nothing else, on this album you get the full burst of what Faith No More was so good at – songs that could be calm and pretty and almost beautiful in musical output, and then descending into the heaviest and hardest change up, without creating a song that you can’t listen to. The composition may sound strange in explanation, but when you actually hear the output, especially on the amazing “Zombie Eaters”, which defies the normal characteristics of what goes in to composing a song, you know how well it works. “Zombie Eaters” is a triumph, an amazing progression from the sublime to the subliminal. The title track “The Real Thing” is in a similar style but without the same range of difference of the previous track. These two songs especially stand out because of the way they are almost a hybrid of sounds and vocal styles that shouldn’t mesh together, and yet with this band do so as if it is just the normal thing to do. Both of these tracks are undeniably brilliant.
The back third of the album mixes up what has come before and offers another dimension to the band’s music. “Underwater Love” and “The Morning After” retain a less manic and more uniform song structure than what has come before, with just as much enjoyment from the band’s efforts. “Woodpecker from Mars” is an instrumental, and a terrific one, but I do wonder if Patton just ran out of ideas for lyrics, or found it too hard to find a way to incorporate them into the music the band had recorded. It would have been a difficult task, that’s for sure. The cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” is amazing, although Patton has always shown a lot of ambivalence for it. Indeed, when singing it live on that tour, he often was unable to show enough interest to sing the lyrics correctly on occasions. The album concludes with the much more serene “Edge of the World”, a style of song the band would drift back to down the track
The band itself is so perfectly represented on this album, that everyone who was a fan or not could discern exactly how wonderful each musician in the band is, because each of their instruments are all powerfully audible in the mix of each track. The brilliant funk bass sound from Billy Gould is so prominent throughout, and indeed alongside Mike Bordin’s perfectly attuned rum style is perhaps the driving force of the band as a result. Sometimes these two instruments become just the background of a band on an album, holding time, but not much else, not given the stage they deserve. That’s definitely not the case here on “The Real Thing”, as both the bass and drums are in your face on every song. Matt Wallace can take a massive bow for his production here, it is superb. Then there is Roddy Bottum and his keyboards, whose expression on every song is so important, and are so intrinsic to the song without sounding like they are just filling a gap between the other instruments. As one of the main song writers alongside Gould, Roddy helps compose the tracks so that each instrument is prolific, including his own, and that is not an easy thing to do for the keyboards, which in other bands can dominate without a purpose. On “The Real Thing”, they complement throughout while still being able to be a major part of each song. And Jim Martin on guitar brings the heavier side to the band, sticking his landing perfectly every time he is asked to punctuate the song with his trademark riffing.
The vocal performance by Mike Patton on this album is one of the most remarkable, and perhaps one of the most outstanding performances in the history of music. The way he is able to sing in every possible genre of music ever, sometimes all in the same track, is quite incredible. The more you listen to the album the more you can understand just what an amazing performance it is. He hits notes in a normal sounding vocal line but can hit the same note again in a soaring melodic voice and then also in a raging metal scream. It is out of this world, and in a way he never did again on a Faith No More album. Everything following this album was different again, and no less spectacular, but definitely in a different category than what he does on this album. Most likely, that was deliberate. Patton is nothing if not an individual who does not like being pigeonholed into one persona.

My first memory of this album was on the release of “Epic” as the single, and the video that promoted it, which was a good six months after the album was released. I didn’t hear the album until the friends that I was in a band with at that time actually played it one afternoon after band practice, and then began suggesting we should play songs off it. I did buy the CD sometime after that (because the cover of “War Pigs” only appeared as a bonus track on the CD and not the vinyl), and once I had digested it all I became hooked. Our band did eventually play some of the songs off this album. We first had a crack at “Epic” for our first ever gig, at our mates 21st birthday party in the back half of 1990, an interesting experience given that we had practiced it twice, and we only played it because a number of people actually requested it that night. Yeah ok, it was awful, but the drunk attendees loved it. It was NOT as awful as the version of “From Out of Nowhere” we played at Jamberoo Pub about six months later, which was truly diabolical. However, we then played “Surprise! You’re Dead!” at another gig about six months after that, and it was a triumph, at least according to the crowd in attendance. It was fun as well. There is nothing easy about playing Faith No More songs, I can tell you from experience. It probably would have helped if we had practiced those first two songs more than we did as well.
1990 was a pretty hectic year in heavy music, but this album held its own throughout the listening year for me. The unique combination of song composition, brilliant musicians and amazing vocals was more than enough to keep interest in this album and band for years to come. And it was one of those rare albums that crossed genres, that was able to be enjoyed and even loved by people of vastly different music tastes. On the tour of Australia to promote this album, the band played amazing smaller venues like The Venue at Dee Why, The Cobra Club, the Revesby Roundhouse, the Marquee Nightclub, and the Sylvania Hotel, where I happened to see them with about 300 other people. It was just amazing to see such a band in such an intimate venue. On their next tour, there was no chance of that.
This album has been on my playlist for the last three weeks. I made mention on my episode on Nirvana’s “Bleach” album that another album had been overshadowing it completely. That was this album. The brightness of the songs, the ecstatic energy and stylistic brilliance of “The Real Thing” is a beacon, even today, over most albums. It’s a mood changer, one that still turns people’s heads whenever it comes on.
Faith No More of course continued on their merry way, but in a different form. The story goes that, having played most of this album on the tour that followed, given the lack of superior material on their other two albums, that by the end of the tour the band was well and truly tired and over playing the same style of songs every night. It led to them moving in a different musical direction by the time they came around to recording the follow up album, one that divided the opinion of the fans they had picked up from this album. But that story is for another episode.

1252. Nirvana / Bleach. 1989. 3/5

In another one of those ‘school bands made good’ stories, vocalist and guitarist Kurt Cobain and bass guitarist Krist Novaselic met when they were at high school together. Their band, and the lineup, went through a number of changes over their initial period together. In fact, they started out as a Creedence Clearwater Revival covers band, with Cobain on drums and Novaselic on guitar and vocals. Eventually they began to write their own songs, and rotating through drummers like spinning tops, almost as many as different bands names that they played under. Some of their names included Skid Row, Ted Ed Fred, Pen Cap Chew, and Bliss, before they finally settled on the name Nirvana. Around this time, having collated a football team full of former drummers, Cobain and Novaselic were introduced to Chad Channing, who became their next, and longest serving to that point in time, full time drummer.
After six months of playing together, the band recorded their first single release for the Seattle independent record label Sub Pop. It was a cover of the song “Love Buzz” by the band Shocking Blue, a Dutch band from the late 1960’s. Following this, the band practiced for two to three weeks in preparation for recording a full-length album, even though Sub Pop had only requested an EP. The band went back into the studio in the final week of December in 1988, to record their debut album, with the main sessions taking place at Reciprocal Recording Studios in Seattle, with local producer Jack Endino. Combined with three tracks that had been written and recorded in January 1988, these came together to form what would become Nirvana’s debut studio album, titled “Bleach”.

As mentioned in the first part of the episode, three of the album's songs were recorded during a previous session at Reciprocal Studios in January 1988. These recordings all featured Dale Crover on drums, who was the drummer from the band The Melvins. The band did try to re-record them with Channing but eventually decided to just release those original versions. Those tracks all have a similar vibe as well, but the most obvious one is ”Paper Cuts” which is difficult to take for several reasons, but one of the main ones for me is the amazing similarity in a 16 bar snatch of the song, on two occasions, that sounds almost exactly like the song “Angry Chair” by Alice in Chains. Of course, this song came before that song, so it begs the question – was the Alice in Chains song a direct rip off of this? Or is it just an amazing coincidence? That’s for you to work out I guess, but it is uncanny just how similar the music and vocals sound between the two. I also know which is the better song. “Downer” only appeared as a bonus track, while the other song was “Floyd the Barber”, whose lyrics are somewhat strangled while the riff and drumbeat retain the same medium throughout. An early example on the album of less lyrics and more repetition.
In the back half of the album, you have songs such as “Scoff” which continue in this tradition of five or six lines of lyrics that still fill four minutes of the song through constant rotation. “Swap Meet” also does this, and with the less refined way that Kurt sings in only to keys all the way through the song. And the closing track “Sifting” repeats this style once again.
Elsewhere, “Blew” opens the album on a positive note with Cobain’s warbling guitar and early grungy guitar riff. The band’s first single, the cover track “Love Buzz”, also found its way onto the album, and is an immediate obvious different track from those written by the band. It is almost a freeform psychedelic journey, with those changing qualities from the rest of the album. There is a lot of buzz coming out of the speakers on this track.
The upbeat songs for me generally come across the best. “Negative Creep” is one of them, though the lyrics again aren’t anything to write home about, pretty much four lines repeated ad nauseum. The same goes for “School”, a song from the same lyrical song book, with the music banged out for Cobain to sing over. It mightn’t be imaginative, but again here the riff chords and drum lines are excellent and enjoyable to listen to. And “Mr Moustache” is perhaps the best of them all, finally breaking out into a faster tempo, allowing the guitar to speak, and Kurt actually sounding like he wants to break into a more energetic vocal line.
The star attraction of the album is “About a Girl”, with almost no distortion, the drums perfectly played and recorded, and Cobain’s best clear vocal melody. It is still difficult to comprehend that this song comes from the same band and the same recording sessions, so different is it from pretty much every other song on the album.

While I did pick this up on CD at some point following the demise of the band in the mid-1990's, my best guess is that it was after the demise of Cobain, and a point at which I had played both “Nevermind” and “In Utero” to death and went back to find this album as a stop gap. I was also eventually gifted this on vinyl by a work colleague, who had a still shrink wrapped second edition vinyl on the Sub Pop label, unopened and unplayed, which he claimed he would never listen to because he didn’t have a turntable. So that was an absolute bonus. Cheers Trent.
One of the problems with re-listening to this album over the past couple of weeks has been that at the same time I have been listening to an album that was released just five days after this, one that got a far greater exposure around the world, one which I knew a lot more of on its entry point to the world, and is a far superior release in every way, shape and form. And that episode is coming up next, on Music from a Lifetime. Stay tuned!
The other major problem that this album always holds, is that there are very few people who could honestly say that they knew of this album, and had heard this album, prior to the release of the band’s follow up effort, the slightly better known “Nevermind”. Indeed, if you meet one of these people who say they DID know of “Bleach” before hearing “Nevermind”, I’d suggest you make them take a lie-detector test. So, it is easy for people’s thoughts on TIS album to be swayed by what they thought of the sophomore effort.
And to be perfectly honest, I have never really been a fan of “Bleach”. There are a few songs here that I enjoy, but for the most part, the songwriting and performance is light years better on the next album and trying to judge this album having listened to “Nevermind” for so long before that, always made this a difficult job. Especially as it really has none of the spark and energy that that album has.
So did this have much going for it? Honestly, no. It cannot be compared to the other albums the band released. It is a perfectly reasonable debut album, one that probably offered a glimpse into what could possibly occur in the future. For me though, it's an album that I might put on for a couple of songs. And that’s about it.