After the success of Gretchen Goes to Nebraska, King's X found itself finally getting a taste of the big time after graduating from underground critical favorites to legitimate up-and-coming talent to watch. Fans held their breath for the hotly anticipated follow up and would receive it after only a scant year in October of 1990 when Faith Hope Love hit the street. Buttressed by the radio success of maybe their most distinctly Beatles-esque track ever, "It's Love", record number three shot up the charts and reached Gold status in the US, as befits it's lavishly gilded cover artwork. Post release it seemed a headwind was finally blowing in the band's direction as they scored opening slots on national tours for heavyweight acts like AC/DC and Living Colour. While their follow up to Faith Hope Love failed to continue their upward trajectory, I've always found the success of this album kind of strange in comparison to their other discs.
First off, credit where credit is due - the front half of Faith Hope Love is about as perfect as one could ask for, starting off with a song that surprisingly isn't six minutes long and full of synth-atmosphere stuff with "We Are Finding Who We Are" before launching into "It's Love" and the infectious groove of "The Fine Art of Friendship" (yeah, seriously). As we move further through the album the band starts to loosen the reins a bit and let some more progressive elements come out of the woodwork, most noticeably on the nearly ten-minute title track, the grating "Talk to You", and what is definitely the most memorable time that I've heard a producer so blatantly display his personal aural stamp on a song with "We Were Born to Be Loved". And here we have the biggest problem with Faith Hope Love: there's no payoff to justify it's run time, which extends ten minutes past the previous two records for little gain. "Faith Hope Love" goes on for approximately twice as long as it should (I actually thought the song was done when I checked the time and saw it there was another five and a half fucking minutes), and "Legal Kill" is a weirdly bad-taste move for a band that otherwise so consistently personifies the hippie/love stereotype - maybe a concerted effort to capture the Christian market? I dunno. What really makes listening to this record such a strangely depressing chore for me is the juxtaposition of the almost annoyingly cheerful lyrics held up against the shit the band was going through at the time. I can only imagine how awful it must have felt to sing songs praising a god that you were pretty sure hated you to a crowd of people who you strongly suspected might jump at the chance to throw you to the dogs (oh wait that actually happened) for breaking their rules. Well.
So yeah, Faith Hope Love. An OK piece of material but decidedly a letdown coming off the heels of their previous work, but even though the elusive commercial success they sought never really materialized, King's X was due to turn in two of their greatest albums ever one after the other - stay tuned.
C+
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