On the turntable this Sunday...Angel Dust

Angel Dust is the fourth studio album by American rock band Faith No More. It was first released through Slash Records on June 8, 1992 in Europe and the United States. It is the follow-up to 1989's highly successful The Real Thing, as well as the band's final studio album with guitarist Jim Martin and the second to feature vocalist Mike Patton. It was the first album in which 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 some lyrics.

It remains Faith No More's best-selling album outside the United States (where, as of November 2010, it has sold 678,000 copies). The album and subsequent tour were very successful in Europe where it went Platinum on sales of more than one million copies and Gold in Australia with more than 35,000 sales. Worldwide sales are around 3 million copies.

Following the success of their previous album, The Real Thing and its subsequent tour, Faith No More took a break for a year and a half before beginning work on the follow-up, Angel Dust. During this time Mike Patton rejoined his high-school band Mr. Bungle to record their eponymous début album.  This situation had an effect on the band, since drummer Mike Bordin thought the writing process was like the state of a "magic slate" having been "completely covered in writing; there was not any more room for any more writing on that slate, so we all went and said all right, and erased everything, and started writing new stuff," and Patton was creatively revitalized. They decided not to "play it safe" and instead took a different musical direction, much to the dismay of guitarist Jim Martin. Martin also didn't like the title of the album as 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.

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." The artwork similarly put a beautiful face on a horrible image by depicting a soft blue airbrushed egret on the cover, photographed by Werner Krutein while on the back is an image of a cow hanging on a meat hook. That image was 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 any opposition to vegetarianism but rather preview the music, suggesting its combination of being "really aggressive and disturbing and then really soothing", the "beautiful with the sick".

The Russian army photo taken in the Red Square with the imposition of the band members' faces over those of the soldiers, was edited by Werner Krutein and was the cover of the "Midlife Crisis" single. The band had originally planned for this but then did not like the final product. Mike Bordin described the situation in these words:

“

That was a thing the record company really tried to foist on us. They really tried to fuck with our layout, and sent us these fucking pictures of us, just our heads. It was like this, they wanted us to have a poster inside the record consisted of our five heads on a black background, everything was black, the whole inside, and it's like, 'Fuck you.' We're going to make our cover, we made our record, we produced it our way, we wrote our songs, we played them our way, it sounds like us.

”

The single cover is similar to that of Led Zeppelin II, which has the faces of the four members of Led Zeppelin airbrushed into an old photograph featuring a group of German Luftwaffe personnel dating from World War I.

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:

“

There had never been any question of my staying in the band. We started writing the music for this album, and being part of something so fundamental was what made sure of it for me. The Real Thing had been like someone else's, someone else's band, it had felt like an obligatory thing. They hadn't needed a damn singer, it was just that they had to have a singer. That's why I was there, that's why Chuck was there, we weren't needed there.

”

Some attributed this to its sonic difference with its predecessors, however, Mike Patton credits it to being "better at playing what [they] hear in [their] heads" and went on to say that "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.

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": "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."

Read more @ Wikipedia