Faith No More

The single "Epic" storms up the charts, and to this day it's still probably their best-known song: not bad for a San Francisco-area quintet with little interest in meeting audience expectations.

While the Faith No More name and Patton's face become prime material for music magazine covers, another band from the West Coast opens doors and parallel universes that serve as a paradigm shift for an entire generation.

In 1992, grunge is huge, and Nirvana are its prophets.

Beyond being personal friends with many artists from the Seattle scene (like Soundgarden), Patton and co. know there's no need for them to ride the new wave, at least not on the timeline and terms set by the more famous bands, even though doing so would be profitable in terms of media exposure.

The band decides to do what it does best: throw everyone off balance.

This second point in particular becomes a matter of contention during the writing phase. Guitarist Jim Martin, the band's resident carrier of the metal gene (and the main advocate for recruiting Patton a few years earlier), grows increasingly irritated both by the constant media intrusion into the recording studio (a roughly four-hour MTV video documenting this is available on YouTube) and by the decision to flesh out the new material with elements rather removed from his own sensibility (such as samples, for the use of which the band has to pay licensing fees).

Jim would rather take things slow and use the studio to actually finish his own parts (unlike Bill Gould, who wants to walk in with everything already worked out), while the record label is pushing to waste as little time as possible. A strange tension thus builds up during the sessions, leading Faith No More to try to fill in Martin's still-missing parts through a sonic exploration involving trusted co-producer Matt Wallace (with them since the very beginning).

The result effectively marks a first step away from the strictly metallic framework of "The Real Thing" (especially on the guitar front - note the number of solos cut down to a historic minimum), and the beginning of a migration toward a musical richness shaped like a multiple, vaguely schizoid personality, also brought to the table by Patton's experience with his original band, Mr. Bungle.

Of course, Faith No More have always wanted to pack as many elements as possible into their music, but this time there's a palpable sense of reaching for a grand kind of maturity, fully aware that this might come at the cost of immediacy.

With "Midlife Crisis" the changes begin. The track clearly draws on a hip-hop structure in its vocals, beat and samples (lifted from Simon & Garfunkel's "Cecilia" and the Beastie Boys' "Car Thief"), yet it turns melancholy in Roddy Bottum's keyboard arrangement and neurotic in Patton's delivery, before exploding into a chorus that finally turns radio-friendly. Jim Martin's guitars, for the first time, are nothing more than rhythmic support.

Adding to the sense of disorientation is "RV", a big ballad (again in 3/4) for piano and drunken crooner, which revisits certain grotesque Mr. Bungle-style atmospheres, and whose lyrics probe a typically American phenomenon: living permanently inside vacation campers ("RV" stands for "recreational vehicle"). It's said that every American family knows at least one person who chooses that circle of existence (disparagingly labeled "white trash"), made up mostly of overweight people who eat junk food in front of the TV while complaining, even about themselves ("I hate you/ Talkin' to myself/ Everybody's staring at me/ I'm only bleedin'"). Patton has claimed there's more than one reference to his own family history in it.

In the aesthetic of "Angel Dust", the songs are facets of a psychotic behavior, stuffed with nonsense and aggression, caresses and slaps, mocking American respectability through the exploits of the volcanic entertainer Patton (to this day one of the most incredible voices rock has ever produced). Unlike grunge, which presents itself as a generational response (whose spleen the band repeatedly toys with), Faith No More's crossover/alternative metal here highlights the complexity of social relationships, leading the small crowd of those who react to life by embracing its most shocking aspects. It's no coincidence that the album's artwork contrasts the ethereal beauty of a little egret (on the front cover) with the rawness of cuts of meat in a butcher shop (on the back).

There are no so-called "minor" moments on "Angel Dust"; the barracks-room humor and the tensions in the recording studio (Jim Martin can barely stand even the album's title, a clear reference to the street name for PCP, the potent hallucinogen widespread in the Seventies and Eighties) only strengthen a rather tight tracklist, in which all the stylistic influences achieve an overall coherence that would have been hard to predict on paper.

And so, for a "Smaller And Smaller" that turns solemn and reflective through the use of Arabic scales and Native American chants, there's a "Be Aggressive", whose playful cheerleader chorus counterbalances a Bill Gould lyric about gay oral sex (apparently with no connection to keyboardist Roddy Bottum's coming out, in fact the first such case among musicians from the metal scene, which would happen shortly after).

Some tracks ("Everything's Ruined", "A Small Victory", "Kindergarten") stand as true beacons of illuminated creative beauty, able to blend guitar firepower, bursts of hip-hop meter, sweeping vocal melodies and cinematic orchestration, yet never detached from the sheer fury of other, deliberately irritating moments such as "Malpractice" or "Jizzlobber" - almost as if to further underline the band's ability to find its way home even under extreme conditions.

It remains clear that, alongside material steeped in Mr. Bungle-style provocative attitude ("Crack Hitler"), Faith No More also see it as essential to work in a proper dose of melody, closing the album with a brilliant rendition of the main theme from the film "Midnight Cowboy" (written by John Barry) and, only on the European edition, a cover of Lionel Richie & The Commodores' "Easy", capable of reaching audiences far wider than the metal militia who usually turn up at their shows.