In 1990, Faith No More were essentially piloting a Boeing 747 over the rapidly changing landscape of pop music. In 1992 they decided to fly it straight into a mountain, and the brief, brilliant burst of fire and shrapnel that resulted was Angel Dust.

The success of The Real Thing had in some ways predicted the downfall of the 1980s rock idiom, as well as the stranglehold of control that the Los Angeles scene had over the country. Nirvana smashed that control completely, but Metallica proved that big, likeable heavy metal could weather the storm. Faith No More could have easily survived the sea change in heavy guitar music — hell, they helped kick start it. What they could not survive was themselves.

In interviews from the time, the band members are sardonic, removed, and incapable of taking themselves seriously. By most accounts, the band was prone to bickering and infighting. Worse, while The Real Thing had begun to pay off the band’s debts, it kept them on the road performing, wearing them down. Record industry personnel buzzed about their camp, anxious for another hit, something to give them confidence while mainstream tastes pulled a 180-degree turn. It was under those circumstances that the band retreated to San Francisco to record Angel Dust.

At the outset, Angel Dust doesn’t seem so far removed from its predecessor. The production is a bit heavier and darker, with the guitars pushed back in the mix, and the bass and keys pushed forward, but that’s the primary difference. The opening trio of songs are each excellent hard-rock singles. “Land Of Sunshine,” bass-driven and bombastic, shows Patton in soaring pop mode as well as sarcastic social commentator, skewering Scientology and other for-profit self-help types and literally peeling with laughter. It’s more dramatic and morbid than The Real Thing, but it still boasts a Martin guitar solo and instantly memorable verses. Following that, “Caffeine” pounds slower and lower, reimagining the rap verses of “Epic” as scraping spoken word. The third song, “Midlife Crisis,” on the other hand, is probably the band’s finest moment — Bordin and Gould bounce like the studio floor was a trampoline while Patton constructs the entire song as a series of interlocking choruses which, at its climax, each fire at once. It rewards at least one repeat listen by design, drawing attention first to Patton’s vocal prowess and then his crass humor. It’s probably the most beloved song ever about a man whose girlfriend won’t have sex during her period, and it remains a highlight of the band’s live shows.

If Faith No More had just populated the rest of Angel Dust with songs like the first three it would have been a suitable follow up to The Real Thing, albeit one a bit too morbid to repeat its success. Rather, those songs are outliers. Four songs in, the album goes off-book with “RV,” a bizarre Tom Waits-ish piano screed sung in the persona of a paranoid homebody. In one sense, it’s a logical continuation of the idea that the band experimented with on “Edge Of The World,” but on the other hand, it runs contrary to everything that came before it on the album as well as The Real Thing. It says “Love me if you dare.”

Angel Dust is contrary on the whole. The Real Thing played with many ideas, but it presented them in a straightforward way, while Angel Dust is so heavily layered with sounds that it fatigues the ear. There may be no genre so antithetical to soul as industrial, and the band threw grating samples all over the album, particularly on Patton’s first composition, “Malpractice,” which seems to narrate a piece of gladiatorial combat.

Much of the album’s brilliance as well as its grating bits seem to be Patton’s doing. Documentary footage from the making of the album shows a band plagued with awkward silences, and Patton’s tension with Martin seems nerve-wracking in particular. Martin was part of the hit-making process, as were Patton’s soaring vocals, and it seems like Patton wasn’t interested in either of those things anymore. As often as he sings, Patton uses his unique voice box to make sounds, to speak with the voice of monsters and perverts and barnyard animals, and then run those takes through filters, distortion pedals, and truck radios. He loved soul music but he also loved grindcore, and he employs that genre’s oft-maligned “pig squeal” once or twice, but he also sings some of his finest choruses on Angel Dust. Fan-favorite “Everything’s Ruined” in particular charms, even though it seems to be about the band knowingly taking their patrons’ expectations and smashing them.

Patton’s penchant for odd characters steers the album into territory that would never have flown with Middle America, and the lyrics make no effort to conceal or encrypt his eccentricities. The prime example is album highlight “Be Aggressive,” a song Bottum wrote in order to humiliate Patton, dedicated to the virtues of male-on-male fellatio. It remains one of the band’s most enduring live numbers. Patton screams “I swallow,” during the pre-chorus, setting the stage for a group of cheerleaders to sing the chorus “be aggressive,” tying the homoeroticism to high school sports and pubescent discovery, the most defended bastions of family values. Similarly, the last three songs on the record are “Crack Hitler,” “Jizzlobber,” and finally, a cover of the theme to Midnight Cowboy, an acclaimed X-rated film about a gay prostitute. In retrospect it’s easy to see why the label people were flipping out. Angel Dust wasn’t exactly the commercial suicide feared by Warner Bros. — it’s the band’s most successful album in Europe, and sold well in re-issue, largely thanks to the bonus track, “Easy” — but it did thumb its nose at many of the people who made the band a success.

The critical acclaim surrounding Angel Dust was immediate upon its release, and it continues. Kerrang! called it the most influential album of all time (hard rock only). What is less than immediate is the album’s appeal. The Real Thing is the more cohesive, lovable record, and Angel Dust is exhausting as well as overlong. But it’s also the rare rock and roll album that invites the listener to think, not just about the jagged self-combating music itself, but also about the fragmented society that produced it. It is the sound of a great band setting itself on fire rather than conforming to a capitalist agenda, even while it tries to write great arena rock music (and sometimes succeeds). Faith No More were trying to recuperate from the album and its fallout up until their dissolution six years later. In many ways it seems like it took them until this year’s Sol Invictus and their reunion tour to mend entirely. It was all worth it, even if they never reach such heights again, even if everything for the band as a unit remains, in some way, ruined.