Blazing Their Own Road

By GIL GRIFFIN

PERFORMER: FAITH NO MORE

ALBUM: ANGEL DUST

LABEL: SLASH/REPRISE

THE BOTTOM LINE: The hard-rocking Bay Area quintet cope with success by sticking with what got them there.

Mainstream pop success is a difficult cross to bear for avant-garde hard rockers. Their stock-in-trade is assaulting the status quo and ridiculing pop culture, yet suddenly their songs are mixed into Top 40 radio's diet of fluffy, fast-food hits. Bands such as Metallica and Nirvana have scored their share of chart toppers recently without being perceived as "selling out." Now, two years after their critically acclaimed, breakthrough album The Real Thing, the San Francisco-based quintet Faith No More are the latest heavy- metal hitters to arrive at this crossroads.

In their third and latest album, Angel Dust, Faith No More's response is to rev up their guitar engines, crank the bass, drums and keyboards, and with a loud scream put the pedal to the metal and once again blaze their own road. Some of the songs are indeed catchy, but don't expect them to become Top 40 fodder, as neither the band's turbulent sound nor its acerbic wit has been sacrificed.

Lead vocalist Mike Patton growls, screeches and roars his way through songs making not-so-subtle commentary on greed, complacency and selfishness. It's easy to laugh at the skewering of a thirtysomething character in the midtempo funk-rocker Midlife Crisis who derives her sense of security from her "pockets jingling" and is wrapped in "morbid self-attention."

But not all of Faith No More's targets are the rich and powerful. In the darkly humorous RV, Patton plays to the hilt a fortysomething couch potato who has made a career of failure. He narrates the sorry soliloquy in a gravelly, hangover-from-hell drone to a bluesy piano and guitar accompaniment. "Besides listening to my belly gurgle/ Ain't much else to do," he groans, then concludes by mumbling, "I think it's time I had a talk with my kids/ I'll just tell 'em what my daddy told me/ You ain't ever gonna amount to nothin'."

Love or loathe the album's characters, they are easily recognizable and convincingly presented -- everyone from the sweet-talking phony on Caffeine and the suffering farmer in Smaller and Smaller down to the drug-slinging kingpin in Crack Hitler. That's what makes Angel Dust poignant, blistering and nightmarishly real.