We Care A Lot (Deluxe Band Edition)

It came super fast and veeeery good quality!

The recent Rhino remasters of the Patton era FNM albums were a contradiction. On one hand having the b-side studio tracks from the era featured on the record as an additional disc was something I had publicly and explicitly requested in 2009 as Mofi bungled the Angel Dust remaster and prior to Music On Vinyl's rather tepid reissues a little later. Rhino managed one thing, they created the best sounding versions of those albums yet made. Owning 40+ versions of Angel Dust and a myriad of pressings of all their other albums, I was well placed to directly compare. However, AD contained not just the studio tracks I wanted to feature (Let's Lynch The Landlord, The World Is Yours, Easy (Cooler Version), Das Schutzenfest) it also contained the rather terrible live tracks which featured on the London and Liberation singles from the album in addition to the forgettable Youth Remixes. It felt bloated and wrong. the same was done on Album of the Year, The Real Thing and to a lesser extent King For A Day. They were tarnished by bloating the bonus content.With We Care A Lot, we got the bootleg a year earlier, which tried to slip through the net as a Record Store Day release. two abhorrent things in one sentence. Record Store Day and bootlegging and ironically contemptible for similar reasons. One screws the record buying public and quite ironically record stores themselves and the other screws the intellectual property owner. So we already had a lean repress with no bonuses, nice colour, but it was unofficial, not particularly great sounding and benefited a greedy bootlegger and the myriad of so called proper record stores who ordered it in through whatever nefarious back channels their grubby little claws could.So the official reissue was set to be special. Something for the fans. Pressed well with a decent bunch of bonuses. I saw the tracklist and was slightly depressed to see so many live tracks. I thought that we had the same thinking as the Rhino reissues of the Patton LPs (again, I love them, but don;t like the majority of their bonus content). I looked forward to a new master for the album. I was apprehensive because I am not a fan of the mastering/post production on Sol Invictus and I had read that the same people would be involved here. I've never been a fan of Wallace and Applebaum's work doesn't sit right with me.As such I delayed buying the record. I saw the lovely purple and blue pre order on sale and left it there. Up until this point I count myself as an avid collector. I rarely miss a release. I owned around 12 different versions of We Care A Lot, but I could not nudge myself into gear for it, in spite of me really really wanting to hear the new master. I heard the 2016 mixes of We Care A Lot and As The World Turns. I hated them. I still do. These were bonus tracks for the LP. I made the right decision I thought.I was drunk and I was bored and had a spare few quid. I bought it against my better judgement. It sat in my record collection for a few weeks. I really didn't care too much for even opening it. I downloaded the files though and put them on my phone. I listened to them on the way to work. The album was beautifully remade. The sound quality exceeded the original LP (and it's early 90's so called remaster)...(the reissue CDs from 95 and 96 were quite poor). I loved the balance, I was hearing details which I had not heard before. The team did a great job. The album ended and the bonus stuff started to kick in. As stated above, the next three tracks, the 2016 mixes did nothing for me, but the demos and live versions of some of my favourite songs were incredible.See, with the Patton live b-sides, they were nearly all really, really poor with the exception of This Guy's In Love With You live in Sydney and As The Worm Turns live at Brixton. With the Patton era we as fans were inundated with live bootleg after live bootleg and the lucky among us also got hold of the BBC transcription discs of stuff that London Recordings probably never heard. The live tracks on these singles were just filler. Added with little thought or understanding. So the issue was two fold. Apathy from a record label trying to fill up three more track places on a 12" single or a maxi and having better sources for live material back in the day.With Chuck era FNM, we did not have rich pickings. So the tracks on this record were curated with care by Gould and the rest of the band, they were not there just to fill space and time but to offer an insight to the band and a dimension we could not access before. The demos are amazing. The Mark Bowen demo in particular offers a dizzying pace and a wonderful aggression I don't associate with Mosley, particularly compared to the original, even surpassing Mike Patton's incredible attack on the song in the 1993 Phoenix festival.As time has gone on, and before I picked this up, We Care A Lot became my favourite album. I saw its influences, I found it to be raw and powerful and the most honest Faith No More record. I love how playful the band are and you can hear that in this early LP. The post punk and new wave influences, that crunching guitar and those driving rhythms with Roddy’s messed up keyboards make this THE quintessential 80's album from a personal point of view. Making it sort of awkward to say with complete honesty that this was my record of 2016.