Angel Dust is the fourth studio album by American rock band Faith No More, released on June 8, 1992, by Slash and Reprise Records. It is the follow-up to 1989's highly successful The Real Thing, and was the band's final album to feature guitarist Jim Martin. It was also the first album where vocalist Mike Patton had any substantial influence on the band's music, having been hired after the other band members had written and recorded everything for The Real Thing except vocals and most of the lyrics. The band stated that they wanted to move away from the funk metal style of their prior releases, towards a more "theatrical" sound.
In the United States, Angel Dust failed to match the commercial heights of The Real Thing. Upon release, it sold roughly 500,000 copies in the United States, while The Real Thing had been certified platinum in the United States for sales of over a million copies. However, in many other countries, it managed to outsell The Real Thing. Due to the international sales, it is Faith No More's best-selling album to date, having sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide. Despite selling less than The Real Thing in the United States, it still managed to debut at number 10 on the Billboard 200, making it the band's only top-ten album in the United States.
Background, title and artwork
Following the success of their previous album The Real Thing and its subsequent tour, Faith No More took a break before beginning work on new songs. Mike Patton recorded the eponymous debut album of his high-school band Mr. Bungle, which was released in August 1991. Faith No More decided not to "play it safe" and instead took a different musical direction, much to the dismay of guitarist Jim Martin. Martin also did not like the album title Angel Dust chosen by keyboardist Roddy Bottum. In an interview taken while they were in the studio he said that "Roddy [Bottum] wanted to name it Angel Dust, I don't know why, I just want you to know that if it's named Angel Dust, it didn't have anything to do with me."The Making of Angel Dust, Jim Martin interview. MTV. Retrieved December 22, 2007 He also stated that Bottum was the one who came up with a basic concept of a bird front cover and a meat locker back cover.
Bottum stated that he chose the name because it "summed up what [they] did perfectly" in that "it's a really beautiful name for a really hideous drug and that should make people think." Similarly, the artwork contrasted one beautiful image with a gruesome one by depicting a soft blue airbrushed great egret on the front cover (photographed by Werner Krutein) while on the back is an image of a cow hanging on a meat hook (created by Mark Burnstein). Both bassist Billy Gould and Mike Bordin said that the image on the rear of the album is not based on support for vegetarianism but rather a preview of the music, suggesting its combination of being "really aggressive and disturbing and then really soothing", the "beautiful with the sick".
At one point, the band were considering naming the album Crack Hitler, in response to how the record label viewed it as potential "commercial suicide". Despite not choosing this name, a song on the album still had the same title. The band had kept the music from the label until the mixing stages. Bottum recalled that they got "really scared" once they heard the album, while Martin remembered that the president visited the studio one day and told the members he hoped none of them had bought houses. In 2022, Gould said that with the album, they did not have ambitions to become bigger than they already were at that point, saying "we didn't expect to be Whitesnake or Bon Jovi, we didn't go into this band wanting to own 15 houses and three Learjets and have 17 supermodels on speed dial".
A photo of a group of Russian soldiers with the band members' heads inserted was edited by Werner Krutein and used as the cover of the "Midlife Crisis" single. The image also appears in the booklet art for Angel Dust. Bordin said that the record label had originally sent the band an image which had their five heads on a black background, and wanted them to use this for the booklet art. The band disliked what the record label sent and came up with the idea to have their heads on a group of Russian soldiers, which Bordin thought was similar to Monty Python and how "you see a guy's head, a monster comes by and picks it up and Ptock! puts it somewhere".
Writing and recording Writing process The writing for Angel Dust took up most of 1991 with large portion of the songs being written by either Billy Gould, Roddy Bottum, Mike Bordin, and for the first time, Mike Patton. Regarding this Patton said:
While some attributed the sonic shift on Angel Dust to Mike Patton's increased involvement, Patton himself downplayed this notion, saying "I just think we've gotten better at playing what we hear in our heads", adding "before, we used to kinda cheat around, and play around what it was. We could never translate it into the band, and we're getting better at doing that. like, we wanted to do a real lazy, sappy kinda ballad, so we covered the theme from Midnight Cowboy! And there's even a song that sounds like The Carpenters!". In a trend that started when then-vocalist Chuck Mosley lived in Los Angeles while the rest of the band resided in the Bay Area, the band would record demo tapes of the songs and exchange them between each other in Los Angeles before sending them to Jim Martin so that he could work on his guitar arrangements, after which he would send them back for approval.
Album producer Matt Wallace stated there was a great deal of tension between Jim Martin and the rest of the band that made the recording sessions difficult. Speaking on the acrimony, Wallace said:
During their 1992 summer European tour, the band sometimes incorporated a disco jam in between songs, possibly as a jab towards Martin and how he viewed Angel Dust as "gay disco". In a 1992 interview with MTV during the making of the album, Patton also joked that they wanted to become a disco band, so they could defend disco music from the likes of Martin.
The lyrics for Angel Dust were written for the most part by vocalist Mike Patton. He got his inspiration for the lyrics from many different places such as questions from the Oxford Capacity Analysis, fortune cookies and late-night television. After engaging in a sleep deprivation experiment, he wrote "Land of Sunshine" and "Caffeine": Patton added that, "I drove around a lot in my Honda, drove to a real bad area of town, parked and just watched people. Coffee shops and white-trash diner-type places were great for inspiration." Patton described "RV" as being a character sketch based on the "white-trash" people he was observing during the making of the album. He said in 1992, "it's the white trash saga: You wake up, you do nothing and you talk a lot of shit... and that's what the song does." "RV" incorporates spoken word elements from Patton, and in 1992, it was described by Music Express magazine as having a "David Lynch aura" to it, due to its unorthodox subject matter and structure. Patton has said the lyrics to "Midlife Crisis" were inspired by singer Madonna, and the song had the working title of "Madonna". Patton felt he was being "bombarded" with Madonna's image in the media at that time. He interpreted her constant reinvention and public presence as a sign of desperation and a struggle to remain relevant, which he channeled into the lyrics.
Songs with lyricists other than Patton include "Be Aggressive" by Roddy Bottum (about fellatio); "Everything's Ruined", by Mike Patton and Billy Gould; "Kindergarten" by Mike Patton and Roddy Bottum; and "Jizzlobber", by Jim Martin and Mike Patton, which according to Patton, is about his fear of imprisonment. However, Gould, in response to a question by a fan, suggested that the song is about a porn star. "Be Aggressive" has homosexual undertones, with Bottum having come out as gay around this time. He said in December 1992 that "what I like about 'Be Aggressive' is that even though it's macho in a homosexual way, lots of FNM listeners probably imagine that it is a woman who is getting down on her knees and swallowing rather than a man. I guess it's easier for people to understand and deal with it that way."
"Kindergarten" has rap-style vocals from Patton, which mirror some of his earlier vocals on The Real Thing. Along with "Caffeine", it is one of the more melancholic tracks, and lyrically highlights a person who is still stuck with the mentality of a child. Towards the end of the song, it incorporates a section where Patton can faintly be heard impersonating an auctioneer during a bidding. "Caffeine" lyrically appears to reference Patton's feelings during the sleep deprivation experiment. In an interview promoting Angel Dust, Patton mentioned that caffeine (via coffee) was the only drug he took. Gould later said that during the making of Angel Dust, Patton developed a coffee dependency to help him relax and function properly. The single "Everything's Ruined" is one of the most piano-driven tracks, with the band considering it to be among the most accessible on the album. Bottum said that despite its accessibility, Patton's vocal stylings added another dimension to it, saying "it's radio friendly for sure, a pop song. But our singer always adds the unexpected and the twists". Patton himself considered the song to still have dark lyrical matter which matched much of the album, saying in 1992 "there are some very strange songs on this record. A lot of them have a lot of despair in them, they're very disturbing. 'Everything's Ruined' is a good example of that." According to Patton, during the writing of the album, he was listening to easy listening-style music, and this inspired the chorus for "Everything's Ruined", which he compared to Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason. "Smaller and Smaller" incorporates cinematic, Middle Eastern flavored synthesizer work from Bottum, and had the working title of "Arabic" or "Arabian Song". Patton was pleased with Bottum's keyboard work on the album, with Bottum using a new E-mu Emax, which didn't have an instruction manual as it had been discarded. Patton in 1992 noted his fascination with heavily incorporating new technology such as this into music, saying to MTV "I think it's probably a good thing if computers just take over music. Because computers are a lot more messed up than people, and the more messed up and farther away music gets from music, the healthier it's going to be for music. I think computers could kind of take it to an new level. People are the worst, the worst thing about music is that people play it."
In addition to exploring instrumental film music with their cover of the Midnight Cowboy theme, the band was experimenting with doing other songs in non-rock genres during this time, including country music on "RV" (which had a working title of "Country Western"), German polka music on the B-side "Das Schützenfest" and R&B/soul music on the bonus track "Easy", which was a cover of the 1977 Commodores song. They would continue to explore doing songs in different genres on their next two releases, with 1995's King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime having a significant number of tracks which weren't written in the style of rock songs. In an August 1992 interview, Gould said "we don't play any style of music that you can put your finger on" and that "we don't have to be a heavy metal band". He added that, "in a way, it is kind of bad when