Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Faith No More - 'Sol Invictus' from Sol Invictus (2015)

One of my favorite albums this year was the new Faith No More album. I didn't have any expectations whatsoever for it, but it turned out to be exactly what I wanted from them. It was kinda low-key but super-creepy and weird. I felt being the solstice-time that it was important to honor Sol Invictus. Hopefully this works! That they would make an album based in quieter grooves and freakiness over the stadium-filling anthems that they never really made all that many of in the first place made this more than a small victory, closer to a complete miracle. I mean, its not like Mike Patton and Co. ever stopped being involved with musicks in the past two decades, and they have brought all of that to bear here and now. That said, the other way it could have gone is as a post-avant Mr. Bungle spazz-out, and Sol Invictus is not that, rather full of tunes and well-constructed bordering-on-dull songs that grow in power the more they are listened to. Here is Faith No More playing 'Superhero' live in studio for the BBC: The wordless vocal sections in the songs are generally my favorites and grant an overall surpassing ambience to what might be AOR/MOR Rokk Traxx but never quite resolve that way. Also they made a video out of 'Daughter of Horror' which rocks!!! There is kind of a dusty Abandoned TexMex Restaurant/Cantina feeling to parts of this album, which makes me dig it ever the more, and adds a cohesive feeling rather than just being a 'oh that's that kind of representative FNM track!' Black Friday Consumer Stampedes get their own Holiday Soundtrack which maybe they really needed? This is an album that acknowledges that FNM are bitter middle-aged dudes and sounds like every day of the intervening decades has passed It is true that Mike Patton at least has been a grumpy middle-aged guy since the early 1990's anyway. This is ultimately a darker, more burnt-out work than anything previous by them, worn out by a seemingly triumphant capitalism which has eaten the world alive. This is an album crawling with both resurrection and zombification and wondering if they are not at all the same thing. The entire album is available as a playlist here: But my favorite song on the album is the very last one, which is about once again coming back from the dead and is the one I played the most in the Subaru this year. It sounds like a celebratory parade welcoming a loved one home, absent of vitriol and sarcasm and is just lovely, although I cannot rule out lurking bitterness and irony because. It is the endcap to 'Sol Invictus' and seems to really mean it

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