FAITH NO MORE'S ‘CRACK HITLER'
FAITH NO MORE have almost finished recording their fourth studio album, as yet untitled and scheduled for a May release through London records. The San Francisco quintet have been parking at Coast Recorders in their home town with producer Matt Wallace who was responsible the platinum-selling "The Real Thing". Mixing is due to begin this month in Los Angeles.
“It’s 80 per cent done," bassist Bill Gould told Melody Maker, "and it's going to sound awesome. It’s a lot heavier than the last record, 100 times heavier. When we were writing, he only thing we didn't want to do was sound like the last record because were so bored with it. We thought it is going to be a lot poppier, but when we listened back to the songs it was like, shit, this is ugly!
"See with Patton (Mike, singer) I think something must have happened in the last two years, his voice has changed... he's finally become a man or something, because his voice is a whole register lower. We have one definite song title, which is "Crack Hitler". It was going to be the title of the LP, but we've been persuaded not to call it that. If we can help it, it will be a single.”
Faith No More have re-recorded an early song "As The Worm Turns" - from their debut LP "We Care A Lot” - but, as Bill says, “Out of spite I don't think we're going to do anything with it because Chuck (Moseley, FNM's vocalist before Mike Patton) would get some of the royalties."
Otherwise, the band have recorded 17 new tracks, of which 1 1 or 12 will make it onto the new album. As ever Faith No More's convoluted internal politics are now coming into their own.
“We have a meeting soon to talk about what needs changing which will probably pretty unpleasant. Everyone has their own f***ing idea of what the record is supposed to be, so
we're in the compromise stage now. If three of us vote for something, the other two have to abide by it. Each song, someone has to compromise, if they want to do something that everyone else thinks is shitty, they'll get outvoted.
So of course now everyone is prowling around trying to get the rest of the band onto their side, there's all this lobbying going on. Everyone's trying to gain allies, but usually end up making enemies, ha ha ha! Jim (Martin, guitarist) was getting shit on by everybody, because he was being a bad boy, but everything's working out just fine. I mean, there's been fighting going on, but no are than usual."
Faith No More unveiled three of the new songs when they supported Metallica at the Day On The Green festival in San Francisco last autumn. Two were extremely ugly, while the third seemed to be Country & Western song.
"Yeah, there's the country song, there is variety. I tend to think of all of them as being super heavy," said Gould. "But this is where we are, this is what's coming out of our heads right now. It might be commercial suicide, it might be huge, but it's uncompromising. A lot of people who bought our last record did so on the success of 'Epic' (the band's first worldwide hit single) you know, a lot of little shits ha ha! And I don't think they re really going to like this new stuff, ha ha ha ha....!"
