The “My Album / Your Album” dynamic. Sounds like a really odd phrase, but you’ve experienced it: You are suddenly enthralled by this artist or band, you’ve listened to their debut a million times, memorized every word and note and have contributed to their sudden overnight success. Now their sophomore album is being released! You run breathlessly to the store or the computer and grab it up! You listen to it and wait for those waves of satisfaction to wash over you. You listen. You listen. You say…
What the hell is this?!
The old saying is that a band has a lifetime to make their first recording and a year to make the second, so that’s where the “sophomore slump” comes into play. That’s partially true. The other part is that a debut album is in some ways a calculated effort to curry the favor of an audience. It does everything right so far as the industry is concerned, and an artist’s weirder, more fringe tendencies get glossed back with harmonies and reverb. Ah, but on the second album, the gloves are off, the sun is up and the freak flag is flying. If you, newfound fan, had created an opinion based on that first impression, you did so with the assistance of market forces. Now it’s time to meet the real deal and, oh dear, it’s just not the way you pictured it.
That’s how it was for most people when they heard Angel Dust, the album arriving after Faith No More’s breakout smash The Real Thing. It was the band’s fourth but the second with Mike Patton at the microphone and was, in many respects, as much a sophomore effort as any. The dynamic was apparent immediately. Where there was restraint, being the cagey way “Epic” said and didn’t say it was about self-gratification, on Angel Dust things were much more blatant: “Be Aggressive” is an ode to fellatio, pure and simple. “Jizzlobber” is about the guilt that would come (pardon the pun) after the actions presumably taken in “Epic.” Where The Real Thing stayed true to the hard rock structure, even as Patton rapped, Angel Dust had twisted pop, rock, even trailer-park country in the humor vein (”RV”); The former had the Black Sabbath cover of “War Pigs” while the latter had a cover of John Barry’s “Theme From Midnight Cowboy.” Need I go on?
