f gives me musical fomo. i feel like i'm cheating on a faithful lover by not choosing feist. i'm missing a party by overlooking the foo fighters. florence and her sidekick machine probably won't talk to me again after this snubbing. franz ferdinand are begging me for some attention. and then there's fleetwood mac. (i'm sorry stevie. i'm so sorry.) but if i've cheated on feist, at least i've done so with my high-school sweetheart and my first true love, faithless. this album envelops me in that warm glow of familiarity, the senses that you'd forgotten existed until that one person (or band) brings them allllll flooding back. i love faithless. until this morning, i'd forgotten just how much.
it's probably been at least five years since i played this album. yet somehow without knowing it i find myself singing along to every single word of the title track. the soulful ballad 'don't leave' is an unlikely choice for track two, but it works. 'flowerstand man' (feat. dido, whose older brother, rollo armstrong, is one of the faithless spearheads) is another yearning, wistful love song - with an irreverant political twist that really appeals to me - slotted in between the funky hip-hop brixton-inspired social commentary of 'baseball cap' and 'dirty old man'. (as an aside, urban legend has it that the then-unknown dido was paid with a curry meal for her contribution to faithless' first album.) 'salva mea' and dance-anthem 'insomnia' are tracks that no longer do it for me, apart from some kind of anachronistic cheese-factor, but i sure loved them as a hyped-up kid. and make no mistake: faithless don't just do electronica. they do funk, they do soul, they do hip-hop, they do rock... my god they are good. for a band that covers such a diverse range of sounds, and that often tours with fourteen or fifteen members, faithless somehow manage to create a unified sound and tell a story throughout an album. and they still rate as one of the best live acts i have ever seen - stunning keys (sister bliss being a classically trained pianist as well as club dj, go figure) blazing guitars, and more percussion than you can, uh... shake a stick at. and then there's the frontman: maxi jazz.
i had a serious thing for maxi jazz once. he must be nearly sixty by now, but it doesn't stop me loving him all over again as soon as i hear him. his voice ranges from the intense to the ambivalent, his songs from the spiritual to the political to the overtly sexual, such as the in-your-face 'if lovin' you is wrong'. the second time i saw faithless live was mere months after maxi had shattered his pelvis in a car-racing accident. even that setback as a forty-something year old could not suppress the energy, the raw, passionate vitality of this man. his stage presence is like no other performer i have ever encountered. i could write an entire thesis on the motif of faith in maxi's music - indeed the sharp contrast between the album title and the band name suggests a certain playful irony. 'reverence' refers to "g.o.d: the grand oral disseminator", a phrase interestingly brought back in the 1998 single 'god is a dj' (from sunday 8pm, another excellent album.) and his contribution to faithless co-founder jamie catto's side-project, '1 giant leap', a collaboration with robbie williams, explores cultures, faiths and identity worldwide. (see yesterday's rant for my take on world music.)
faithless are like a former lover you haven't seen for five years: your lives might've taken different paths, but when you catch up over a beer it's familiar and comfortable, like nothing has changed. bless.
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