Faith No More. Boy did they put my mother through some weird and crazy adolescent years. I had to be around 12 or 13 when they started to play Epic on MTV, and the rest was history as one of my top 5 metal bands. Sooo much controversy over that flopping fish at the end!
I wanted to “be like Mike” – and definitely not Michael Jordan for whom the slogan is popular. I wanted to wear baggy shirts, flannel shorts, and shave my sides, and be crazy and fun, all at the young age of 12. Looking at these videos now, I can definitely say that they have influenced my tastes in music, as well as my style – perhaps more than I realized!
I followed them throughout their career as a band, and even went back into the discography to get all 6 of their studio albums before they decided to take a hiatus. Every single one of them is a masterpiece, and when I heard a TV show describe them as a “one hit wonder,” I was flabbergasted! To their millions of fans across the globe, they are anything but. Their last, and 6th, studio album, “Album of the Year” was released in 1997. I never thought that we would hear anything from them ever again.
When they released the first single, Motherfucker back in November 2014, I was fully on board. It’s classic Faith No More with masterful composition, and super smart, sardonic, and at times, crass lyrics, just like everything that came before it.
It’s been a long 18 years since the release of their last album, and now they have donned their latest, Sol Invictus, upon us. It is nothing short of amazing! The music is great, Mike Patton’s voice is sexy as ever, and the lyrics are ambiguous enough for you to draw your own conclusions on what they mean.
Cone of Shame seems to be about a tired, rusty marriage, Black Friday is about the ridiculousness of consumerism, and my favorite track on the album, Motherfucker reminds me of the problems in our culture brought on by the processed crap we eat, the prescriptions we take, and if we don’t mind what we’re doing to our bodies and the planet, we’re in trouble, and we better do something about it soon, or we’ll suffer the consequences. You tell ’em, Mike!
Seriously, you’ve got to pick up this album, and listen to it a couple times. It will grow on you like “mold” as my better half would say. He’s so saucy.
Metal Forever,
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