Ex-Faith

I'd be curious what most Faith No More fans out there think of the Chuck Mosley years. Like pretty much everyone, I didn't pick up Introduce Yourself and We Care A Lot until after I got a hook in the mouth from Mike Patton and the epic that was "Epic." First thing to notice upon listening to their "lost" first albums wasn't the familiar-ish music but who the fuck was singing? If you could call it singing, it was this weird off-key drunken sort of rap/caterwaul, completely undefinable. Painful at times. Yet this was the time that if you plunked down $13 of your hard-earned dollars for CD (or cassette as in the case of We Care A Lot) you fucking listened to it. A lot. And so I did and over the months between Real Thing and Angel Dust I really became a fan of original vocalist Chuck Mosley's version of FNM. Some of his songs ("The Crab Song", "As The Worm Turns" and "Mark Bowen" especially) are as much classics as anything from the Patton years. Unfortunately Chuck had a rough couple years after his stint (and ugly parting) with FNM - it took until the end of the millennium for him and his new band VUA (Vanduls Ugents Alliderasy) to get an album recorded, only to have it promptly dropped by the engineer and shelved for a decade. Fast forward to 2009, thanks to the internet and all that hi-tech computer shit - Will Rap Over Hard Rock For Food was finally released. It's a surprisingly cool album with guest appearances from Jonathan Davis and Roddy Bottum (in a fucking amazing nü metal retread of "We Care A Lot" that you simply have to hear) and Chuck sounding exactly like his bad self in 1987. There are enough styles on this album to please any genre afficionado, there are flavors of Ween, Toadies and even fucking Limp Bizkit. Check his shit out here, spend some money and get one of his dreadlocks. Enjoy and welcome back Mr. Mosley.

What the FUCK Chuck?

A Small Victory

My previous nostalgic waxing notwithstanding, Faith No More is a band I have so been into at points in my life that to just hear a specific song of theirs can spark really exact memories of my highschool, college and beyond. It still baffles me how they never became the hugest band of the era, the fact that "Epic" a catchy-yet-cheesy raprock anthem is still their greatest Billboard claim to fame still chafes me to no end. Regardless, caught up in the wave that Patton and the boys were forging, I bought every fucking CD-single that the band released. Domestic or import. Australia, UK, Japan, you name it. Buy them for the bonus stuff: live tracks, remixes, occasional outtakes and rarities - some international releases contained the exact same songs as the U.S. version but had different cover artwork - and I tried to get them all. Years later as the realization that a decade of reckless credit card bills eventually have to be paid off dawned on me I dug into my considerable CD collection and wandered down to the local Buy/Sell record store to try and eke out 25% of what I originally paid for them to help in my war against Visa's debt collection department. I sold a lot that day but I remember the guy behind the counter pushing my big stack of Faith No More CD-singles back across the counter to me with the condescending comment: "Can't sell 'em. I have no faith in Faith No More." (like how he did that?) Shit, I thought I was gonna net at least $100 alone for those fuckers! Oh well. Long story short, all these years later I'm glad I still have that stack (and, somewhat more importantly, debt-free but that's another story). Spanning the entire Slash Records era from Introduce Yourself to Album Of The Year, I compiled all the bonus CD-single stuff into a complete album. I ignored the live stuff since it's mostly taken from Live At The Brixton Academy anyway and instead left you with a bunch of cool remixes, extended and radio edits, unreleased tracks, polka covers of Dead Kennedy songs and "Das Schützenfest." Enjoy.

Ashes To Ashes