Faith No More’s Angel Dust was my first exposure to the very idea of the Difficult Follow-Up Album, and I’m guessing that thousands of other kids shared my experience. The album came three years after The Real Thing, the San Francisco band’s breakthrough. I’d bought The Real Thing on cassette with birthday gift-certificate money, and it pretty effectively blew my mind; I still consider it one of my favorite albums ever. That album gets a ton of credit and blame for helping to popularize rap-metal, but it was a lot more than that: An all-over-the-place idea-blast from a band who knew how to weld pop craftsmanship to thrash power. That album veered from quasi-Middle-Eastern orchestral churn (“Woodpecker From Mars”) to dementedly creepy lounge-singer irony (“Edge Of The World”) to all-out blitzkrieg (“Surprise! You’re Dead”), but the whole thing felt cohesive because the band remained in a thunderous groove throughout and because they always tossed in triumphant hooks like the synth-line on “Falling To Pieces.” To a 10-year-old me, this was unbelievably fearless and exciting music. It felt cool to like, which was a new thing for me. Around the time Angel Dust came out, I read interviews with Mike Patton in Circus and Hit Parader where he talked about how he wanted the new album to piss off old fans, and I remember being puzzled and a little bit annoyed that this band I loved would want to intentionally fuck with me like that. And when I finally heard Angel Dust, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. Truthfully, I’m still not sure I can.
Patton had joined Faith No More as a hired-gun vocalist when they were working on The Real Thing. He didn’t help write any of it, and his inclusion must’ve seemed like an actual commercial move when they hired him. Patton had (and has) pipes, and his gigantic welling-up wails greatly increased the scope of what Faith No More could do. Chuck Mosely, their previous singer, had been more of a sneery-barker type, whereas Patton seemed to exist on the same vocal plane as contemporaries like, say, Queensrÿche’s Geoff Tate. But in between The Real Thing and Angel Dust, Patton went back to work with his high-school band Mr. Bungle and generally went full Zappa-splooge. Returning to the Faith No More ranks, he decided he wanted to get weird with it on the next album. It probably caused some dissent within the band (guitarist Jim Martin left soon after), but weird is what they got.
Faith No More used to get the “alternative metal” tag in the magazines I was just starting to read, but the form of stomp-rock iconoclasm that exists on Angel Dust was light-years removed from the grunge revolution that was happening elsewhere. Instead, it’s a dizzily omnivorous thing, one that delights in shoving listeners’ heads into its excesses. About 40 seconds into the juddering groove of opening track “Land Of Sunshine,” we hear stereopanning, multitracked, echoey evil laughter, one of the creepiest things I’d ever heard at that point. “Be Aggressive” has cheerleader chants. “Jizzlobber” ends in straight-up opera. The album’s final track is a cover of the impressionistic instrumental score from Midnight Cowboy, a movie I’d never heard of. With kickass first single “Midlife Crisis,” Faith No More found a way to land in the pop charts with a song that includes a line about “your menstruating heart” in its chorus. I had no idea what the fuck was going on with this thing.
But I also don’t want to oversell the album’s weirdness, since its prime power came from its overcharged groove, a groove even deeper than the one on The Real Thing. For all their ambitions, Faith No More weren’t afraid to be considered a metal band, and the rhythm section remains utterly locked-in throughout, remaining in primal-stomp mode and grounding the band’s flight of fancy. Keyboardist Roddy Bottum, meanwhile, would go onto make some pretty great Cars-informed power-pop as Imperial Teen’s frontman, and his gift for new-wave hooks is all over tracks like “Smaller And Smaller.” Listening to the album now, some of its further-out bits haven’t aged all that well; it might’ve been transgressive to call a song “Jizzlobber” then, but now it just seems goofy. But that groove and those hooks endure.
The band’s rap influence had decreased in the years since The Real Thing, but they developed a fascination with sampling that existed entirely outside that, and Angel Dust is full of record-scratches and snatches of outside music that don’t distract from the music but add to its atmospheric power instead. The entire beat for “Midlife Crisis,” it turns out, comes from the euphoric opening drum-ripples of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia” — the sort of thing that never would’ve occurred to me, but which explains all the deja vu the song gave me, and which I’ll now never be able to unhear. “Midlife Crisis” came with a furious stomp, the sort of thing that could still sound tough when placed next to the something like Pantera’s “Walk,” which had come out a few months before. And in the operatic trudge of Angel Dust, we can hear the beginnings of ideas that prog-informed metal bands like Tool and the Deftones would keep running with for years afterward.
By some glorious accident of fate, Faith No More ended up being the first band I’d ever see live. They opened up my first concert: The first night of the ill-fated Guns N’ Roses/Metallica co-headlining tour at D.C.’s RFK Stadium. Because the two headliners both played endless sets, Faith No More went on at 5:30 in the afternoon and didn’t get a whole lot of time. I don’t remember a whole lot about their set other than the upper-deck bird’s eye view of an entire sea of fists pumping in time to “Epic,” their closer. Also, maybe some stuff exploded? And maybe some dudes were moshing at the back of the stadium floor? It was a long time ago. But in retrospect, it’s pretty amazing that they were on that bill at all. Axl Rose had hoped to recruit Nirvana to open that tour, but Kurt Cobain didn’t approve of Axl’s lyrics about women, so it went to Faith No More instead. I was happy about that. I liked The Real Thing better than Nevermind — still do, matter of fact. (In Utero beats Angel Dust for me, but it’s close.) The show was just a couple of months after Angel Dust came out, so they were promoting an album this weird by playing stadiums, opening for arguably the two biggest bands on the face of the earth. Thinking back on it now, that is a small victory.
So: What memories do you guys associate with this album? Where does it fit with Faith No More’s history, or with the greater history of early-’90s rock? What’s your favorite song from it? And would you like to watch some videos for songs from the album? Because we’ve got some below.
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The only “Metal” album I stil listen to, years after discovering it.
My favorite track would have to be Everything’s Ruined. I think it’s perfect. Caffeine is a close second too.
So true re: Everything’s Ruined. The record highlight, for sure. “But when he lost his appetite, he lost his weight in friends” has always stood out as a great lyric.
always thought this record was their finest moment, even over the real thing: heavier, darker, and the songs tie together better. i picked it up at a goodwill a few years ago and i always regard it as $2 well spent and an excellent addition to any record collection. faith no more forever!
Slight correction – Geoff Barrow was in Portishead. Queensryche was Geoff Tate.
Augh, yeah, got my Geoffs mixed up. At least Geoffrey the Toys R Us giraffe was not involved.
Haha – I don’t think I ever knew he had a name!
When I first heard Geoff Tate’s name, the first thing I thought of was Toys R’ Us. Of course, as a 13 year old wanna-be badass, I kept it to myself.
I think you mean Queensryche’s Geoff Tate not Geoff Barrow.
however you feel about this album, there really is none other like it. small victory was always one of my favorites. love that kabuki-esque lead. crack hitler is pretty great too.
I actually didn’t hear this album until 2001, right after I graduated high school. I strangely bought all the Mr. Bungle albums first (I was a huge Zappa fan looking for other “weird” music) and then worked my way toward Faith No More. Angel Dust took a few listens to sink in, but I quickly grew to love it. I remember spending a lot my freshman year of college holed up in my room listening to it. I wound up becoming a huge Mike Patton geek for a while, and while my interest in Patton has cooled over the years, Angel Dust is still one of my favorites. However, I still think Bungle’s California is Mike Patton’s true masterpiece.
I agree that California is an undeniable masterpeice… Music schools will one day have it as part of their curriculum discussing the geratest achievements in analog production.
A Masterpiece.
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but that’s pretty much every video for you, right?
Oh man, Surge! I wish they would bring it back. You can only get it in Norway or on Ebay at a high price now.
This is my favorite Faith No More album….by far. The Real Thing is a runner up, but it doesn’t have the mind blowing music of this one. I never understood why they regressed to straight ahead (for them anyway) metal on the albums after this.
I had a poster of this album cover on my wall in high school (when it came out). I seem to remember the album cover actually had pictures of raw meat around the edges (see the back cover of the album). In retrospect my parents were pretty understanding.
I love this album because it really defies categorization. I love the Real Thing too, but it’s relatively a hard rock/metal album. Angel Dust is just weird.
Also my favorite FTM album. It truly was their masterpiece. It was a product of such a unique set of musicians and they never made an album that came close to this one again. Kindergarten is my favorite song but it is pretty flawless front to back. Probably the first album that I owned that I would consider a “grower”. I can still put this on and find new things to love about it.
Of course I mean FNM. Dumbass.
This album came out when I was eighteen and while I liked it, it took me about three years to really love it. The thing I find about it is that it seems to make more sense the older I get. There is a lot of tension about being the cusp of responsibility and adulthood – the child rearing horror of Everything’s Ruined and the suicide swing of a wasted life of RV. Land of Sunshine and Caffeine play to similar fears – it is a headfuck of an album but by far their best, endlessly entertaining and yet to reveal all it’s secrets twenty years on.
I remember being about 13 or 14 and listening to a Faith No More gig on Radio 1 late at night just after Angel Dust came out. I’d never heard anything like it. The synths, the samples, the weird choruses and hooks, the heavy, thrashy guitars. I won’t claim to have understood it straight away but it left a hell of an impression on me. Completely uncompromising, supremely confident and so so weird. Plus Mike Patton was (and is) the coolest motherfucker on the planet.
In fact, cool is the word. It was really, really cool. One of my favourite albums to this day.
You’re writing a great reviewing, talking about how AD was some sort of musical revolution, then all of a sudden you bring overrated Nirvana to the conversation declaring “In Utero” a better album… really? Really? I know we all have our tastes and all (heck, I rode the Nirvana in my teens), but ANYTHING Nirvana recorded, pales in comparison to Faith No More’s masterpieces. Musically, they’re not even in the same league; puffy can do things with the drums that overrated tool from the Foo Fighters could never even dream of; Billy’s talent in the bass is in another universe compare to theirs, and Cobain, well excuse me, and no offense to his millions of fans, but that guys vocals are technically inferior to Patton’s big time. Cobain sang from the heart, wrote inspirations lyrics, but let’s be honet, Patton’s voice by 1990 was in the league of the greats and it only matured. Please, a Tool, Meshuggah, Portishead, Beastie Boys, Melvins, Sonic Youth and no doubt a Mr. Bungle album are greater than Nirvana’s. With that said, all hail to the UNDATED and seminal masterpiece that is Angel Dust!
An album of boundless energy and creativity! One of my favorite albums of all time! I used to listen to this endlessly on the bus to school in 8th grade on my cassette Walkman. No other group could ever replicate this type of album. Faith No More for all their differences within the group, managed to make something greater than the sum of its parts. It reminds me of the thrill that I get from one of my other favorite albums of all time “De La Soul Is Dead” by De La Soul, in that it exists in a genre, but totally transcends it as well, simply by being so imaginitive that it can’t be contained by mere words.
Yup, this album blew my 14 year old mind. It’s really satisfying to read articles like this and to talk to people today who also enjoyed this, this wasn’t exactly the coolest album to be listing to in 1992. It holds up much better then the grunge albums of the era, happy birthday Angel Dust!!!
This is the album that has had the greatest impact on my life. It was the first time I felt like I understood an artist’s will to fuck with his audience, and it changed everything for me. I don’t think I gave any other album as many spins as this one in my lifetime. Except maybe Pony Express Record.
I loved Angel Dust when I was a teen, and I still love it now. I always liked it better than The Real Thing, also…it’s just so amazing. Small Victory, Be Aggressive, Everything’s Ruined, and Kindergarten are the highlights, but it’s all terrific….
I think Angel Dust is an amazing album that is still fresh to me today. It did indeed destroy its predecessor fully and completely. Having seen Faith No More on that very tour (I believe it was Mike Patton’s 28th B-Day – with openers Kyuss and Babe’s in Toyland) the guy really showed his vocal skills. A memory that I still visit often.
I loved this album when it came out and continue to love it still.