MUSIC

Faith No More

PHOTO: DUSTIN RABIN

From the Underground

Faith No More’s Roddy Bottum talks about the band’s rise from 1980s oddball bombast to having one of the most recognizable hit songs of all time

BY JASON GARGANO

Faith No More is a curious case. The five-piece band — which currently includes drummer Mike Bordin, keyboardist Roddy Bottum, bassist Billy Gould, guitarist Jon Hudson and singer Mike Patton — came out of an early 1980s San Francisco underground scene armed with an unorthodox sound and aesthetic that confounded as many as it piqued: dirge-like Metal riffs punctuated by massive, keyboarddriven hooks, coming off like a messier Public Image Ltd. minus Johnny Rotten. The vocals, often shouted via a revolving door of singers, were almost an afterthought until Chuck Mosley entered the picture for the band’s 1985 debut, We Care a Lot.

The follow-up, 1987’s Introduce Yourself, featured a revamped version of the debut’s title track, “We Care a Lot,” which became a minor hit on MTV and introduced Faith No More to a broader audience than they ever thought possible. Patton replaced Mosley in 1988, kick-starting the band’s creative evolution behind its new frontman’s versatile, octave-jumping vocal delivery and swaggering, often peculiar disposition. 1989’s The Real Thing cemented Faith No More’s move from minor curiosity to mainstream fixtures. The album’s centerpiece, the aptly titled “Epic,” was a top 10 hit and its video was in constant rotation on MTV. The Real Thing sold 4 million copies worldwide but it was the next effort, 1992’s art-damaged Angel Dust, that would serve as Faith No More’s creative landmark.

Released amid the height of the Grunge Revolution, Angel Dust was unlike anything on the landscape, a surreal genre-jumper that mixed heavy guitars, atmospheric keyboards and off-kilter yet somehow cohesive song structures, all topped with Patton’s distinctive delivery, which moves from soaring operatics to guttural yelps and back again. In 2003, Kerrang! listed Angel Dust as the most influential album of all time, which is obviously overstating the case, but not by as much as one might suspect.

Faith No More dropped two more records with diminishing returns (1995’s King for a Day … Fool for a Lifetime and 1997’s Record of the Year) before breaking up in 1998. Yet, like any band with an itch to revisit its legacy, the fivesome reformed to play live shows in 2009 and eventually released an album of new material. 2015’s Sol Invictus was a more sonically streamlined but no less dynamic effort.

CityBeat recently connected with Faith No More’s co-founder/ keyboardist Roddy Bottum to discuss the band’s rise from underground oddballs to platinum sellers with the ability to headline festivals like Riot Fest in Chicago and draw massive crowds overseas more than 30 years after its unlikely breakthrough.

CityBeat: It’s been six years since Faith No More last released an album and played a live show. What’s it like for you to go back to the band again after such a long break? Roddy Bottum: I have mixed feelings about it. It starts out like it’s a job, and we’ve made this decision and we’re going to do it. It starts out sort of like that but really quickly it turns into an emotional journey because of all the music that we’ve made together in that band. We started from such a young age. It’s all these deep-rooted songs and musical expressions that we made from when we were so young and so impressionable and I can’t help but get swept up into the emotional aspect of it.

CB: I didn’t realize until I started digging into the history of the band that you, Billy (Gould) and Mike (Bordin) starting playing together just out of high school more than 40 years ago. What would the 18-year-old Roddy think of where the band has gone over the years? RB: Yeah, it’s crazy. We were such cocky young kids at that age. Billy and I grew up in Los Angeles together from the age of, like, 10. When we formed the band and started making music, we kind of had high aspirations that were ridiculous but kind of founded. We were making this preposterous, sort of really bombastic sound. I kind of never really thought it was going to do what it did, but we always acted like it was going to do well and that we were kind of bigger than we were. And at one point things just kind of caught up and it became a successful sort of thing. It was a surprise to me. Looking back from where I am and how this band morphed and became successful, it would have shocked young Roddy.

CB: In the early days, you guys were more of a performance-art band playing heavy, hypnotic riffs behind a revolving door of different singers. What do you

SOUND ADVICE

Alanis Morissette with Garbage and Cat Power

Wednesday, Sept. 15 • Riverbend Music Center

Alanis Morissette, the big-voiced Canadian who jumped from child TV star to musical phenomenon with 1995’s Jagged Little Pill, was set to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her breakthrough album with an extended tour when the pandemic shut things down in 2020.

“It’s been a huge social, relational, spiritual, cultural, economic, political fart storm over the last while,” Morissette told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. “And, one thing, there’s so many silver linings. It almost feels sacrilegious to bring them up while we are still in the middle of this, but so many themes of expression are available.”

The now 47-year-old performer is likely referencing her ironically busy previous two years: the arrival of her third child in August 2019, which was followed in December with the longgestating Broadway debut of a musical version of Jagged Little Pill. She capped things off with her first new album in eight years, Such Pretty Forks in the Road, which dropped in July 2020.

And now Morissette is ready to finally hit the road in celebration of an album that has sold an astonishing 33 million copies worldwide and found listeners singing along to unblinkingly confessional lyrics like, “Is she perverted like me?/Does she go down on you in a theater?”

Listening to Jagged Little Pill today, the album’s so-called feminist bombshells somewhat give way to a rush of ’90s nostalgia for a time before the internet was ubiquitous and MTV was still known for music videos (isn’t it ironic?). With that era in mind, Morissette is bringing along a pair of equally expressive women to support the tour: Shirley Manson, the frontwoman of Garbage, and Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power. (Jason Gargano)

BLACKSTARKIDS

Friday, Sept. 17 • MOTR Pub

As members of Generation Z continue flooding the workforce while grappling with the existential dread of adulthood, a hunger for early 2000s nostalgia has entered the cultural zeitgeist. Though the silicone bombast of Hyperpop music has successfully reframed those formative years into a fantasia of cybernetic fashion and genre bending, Pop Punk-reviving camp, Missouri-based trio BLACKSTARKIDS offer a more intimate, pastel-toned recollection of the past. Specializing in lo-fi composition and ultra-optimistic energy, they sound like a garage band from a coming-ofage flick or Degrassi episode come to life — in the best way possible. 2020’s SURF, the band’s sophomore effort, is the perfect soundtrack to slacking off on summer days. The band fuses Hip Hop and Alt-Rock in a way that feels decidedly less cynical than many of their peers aiming for the same, threading adorably Autotuned choruses through jangly guitar riffs and glistening Synth Pop chord progressions. You can trace a path from BLACKSTARKIDS’ casual vocal delivery to the twee affectations of seminal Indie Rock band Beat Happening, but comparisons to ’90s Conscious Rap collective Arrested Development feel just as apt.

WHATEVER, MAN, released later last year, marked the band’s debut with British label Dirty Hit, which also houses The 1975. Though the overall sound hasn’t changed much, their Pop songwriting chops have sharpened, resulting in two excellent celebrityobsessed singles: “FRANKIE MUNIZ” and “BRITNEY, BITCH.” Though BLACKSTARKIDS may not be Pop stars yet, we can still dream about the big time alongside them.

Alanis Morissette

PHOTO: SHELBY DUNCAN

BLACKSTARKIDS’ SURF

Big Freedia

PHOTO: MIDCITIZEN ENTERTAINMENT

BLACKSTARKIDS performs at 10 p.m. Friday, Sept. 17, at MOTR Pub. Proof of COVID-19 vaccination or proof of a negative COVID-19 test from the prior 72 hours is required. (Jude Noel)

Big Freedia

Tuesday, Sept. 21 • Bogart’s

Though Bounce music may not be a household genre outside of its native Louisiana, its influence has had a major influence on the current Pop music landscape. If you listened to Hip Hop radio for any length of time in 2018, it’s almost certain you’re familiar with Drake’s inescapable smash hit “Nice For What,” which recontextualized Bounce’s syncopated club percussion and call-and-response refrains into a breezy slice of R&B.

Catchy as Drake’s songwriting may be, it’s the jarring chant that punctuates his silky hooks and captionworthy wordplay that demands your attention — the in-your-face voice of Bounce figurehead Big Freedia, whose declaration that “these hoes / they mad” could start an impromptu dance party among even the stuffiest crowd.

The Drake feature might have represented a breakthrough into the mainstream for Freedia, but her career and influence have spanned the past two decades. She debuted in New Orleans’ club scene in 1999, inspired by drag queen and emcee Katey Red.

Her early tracks like “Gin in My System” have an almost Industrial quality, built around tinny drum machine beats and chopped-up vocals that sound like they’ve been barked into a bullhorn. Big Freedia’s presence became almost mythical after her prolific post-Katrina presence helped rebuild venues around New Orleans, playing multiple shows per night.

As twerking became a part of the pop culture vernacular and the EDM festival circuit began to morph into a billion dollar industry in the early 2010s, Freedia’s music began to garner national relevance and critical acclaim. She played well-received South By Southwest sets, was interpolated by Lil Wayne, and toured with The Postal Service in 2013, all building up to a 2016 feature on Beyoncé’s “Formation”.

Though COVID-19 interrupted plans to tour with Kesha in 2020, Big Freedia has managed to score a number highprofile collaborations since “Nice for What,” starring on Charli XCX’s epic posse cut “Shake It,” Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Reimagined, and the Space Jam: A New Legacy soundtrack with an endearingly ridiculous verse that namedrops the majority of the Looney Tunes cast. It’s completely bonkers, but in Big Freedia’s sonic universe, anything less than over-the-top just simply isn’t on brand.

Big Freedia performs at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 21, at Bogart’s. Proof of full COVID-19 vaccination or proof of a negative COVID-19 test from the prior 72 hours is required. (JN)

Faith No More’s Angel Dust album cover

PHOTO: SLASH RECORDS

FROM PAGE 45

remember about the approach of the band at that point? RB: I think we started doing what we started doing because we were really young and super-experimental. We made these crazy riffs that we would play over and over again. It felt like a very young person’s perspective. We were aiming to shock and provoke people. We were the product of the community we were making music in, which was a lot of really dark and pretty seriously toned Post Punk kind of music, and we were trying to combat against that.

We did very dark music but we were fully experimental. The concept of bringing in different singers and switching singers was sort of part of that. We didn’t really write traditional songs or commercially viable material because we didn’t have the tools to do that.

CB: You had been a band for five years before the first record with Chuck Mosley as singer. How did the band change by then from the early days? RB: Even when Chuck was in the band and we made a record with our first (permanent) singer, I don’t think he really had the integrity to sing regular songs. I love our first records, don’t get me wrong, but I think they limited what we were capable of doing in terms of writing orthodox songs or commercially viable songs. I think once Mike (Patton) got into the band — and he has such an amazing voice and he’s so versatile — we were able to do whatever we wanted to do. And by that point, the three of us had been playing together for so long. I think we were better at what we did; our tools were more sharpened to do whatever we wanted to do. We just started to explore different things. Like, “Oh, let’s make a Country Western song. Let’s make an operatic-sounding song.” We started going into as many directions as we thought we could to push ourselves. In that push, we ended up probably more conventional than we thought we ever could.

CB: You once said that tension and the release of tension is what drives Faith No More. Why do you think that is the driving force within the band? RB: I think I meant the tension among us as people. When we first started touring, it was always butting heads. It’s five different personalities, and that was a big part of what we were. We were really different people. Me being a gay man who grew up with three sisters, and the guitar player at the time, Jim Martin, grew up in a family of three brothers and hunted and stuff. We were polar opposites. That alone is a lot of tension and a lot of butting of heads. But we were also no different than any band — everybody goes on a journey and evolves.

And then you throw into that mix where we’ve gone the past 25 years — all of us separately, all of us together — it’s a lot to bring to the table. We’ve always been pretty up front about the tension that exists between us. I guess it’s healthy, but sometimes not. All I know is that going into the scenario and playing with the band and working with old friends, I always walk away from it a better person. There is a release of tension that happens that sort of makes me thrive and feel good. It’s a matter, at this point, of addressing our past and coming to terms with who we were and who we are now as a group and individually.

Faith No More plays PromoWest Pavilion at OVATION on Sept. 22. All concertgoers are required to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours of the show. More info: promowestlive.com.