Faust
by Faust

From meccalecca TOP 100 COMMENTER 03/14/2013 16:48 | #68280 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

Listening to Faust is an experience. Rather than simply existing in a space, it builds its own for the listener. As with most avant-garde music, its greatest value is inside the doors it opens. (Edited)

'Faust' is vaguely reminiscent of aspects of Zappa-esque collage allied to the Red Crayola. Technically, the music on the album pushed to the extreme an aesthetics of darkness, ugliness, fear, chaos and irrationality.

When I first heard this, I didn't understand it, but after a few listens it began to slowly permeate into my brain. Nowhere else has such an audacious attempt been made at transposing expressionism, surrealism, theater of the absurd, Brecht/Weill's cabaret, Wagner-ain melodrama, musique concrete and abstract painting to rock music.

All the above elements are fused together in a deliberately incoherent way. It is only during the last few recited lines of poetry that close the album, do all of the musical and lyrical puzzles and puns that preceded it, fall into place.

'Faust', is in its totality, a beautifully demented piece of music, that actually, behind the surface, is a moving and lyrical vision of the human condition - one of the most lyrical in the entire history of rock music. This is a music that was at one and the same time illustrative of the progressive-rock movement, whilst also simultaneously managing to transcend it.

From bestdressed 11/14/2014 10:35 | #126946 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

Great album. If you told me this album was made by an extraterrestrial life form I might believe it. (Edited)

Jesus Christfuck. Faust is an intense concept that really requires a listener to listen. After several run-throughs it slowly begins to make more and more sense. Although this album will clearly split listeners into "I get it" and "too deep for me" with either side not understanding the other I believe if anyone truly listens to and digests this they will understand.

More art than music, Faust begins as gnawing noise that intrudes and damages someone's mind with caustic dissonance. The more one takes it in and lets it sit, the more one can begin to truly enjoy it and see it less as art and more as human exploration - a few people's attempts to take out everything bad about humanity, fear, anger, hate and desperation and display it for you to see yourself.

It's only when listening to the entire album can someone understand that the polarity they show between the bad and good in people be shown and I would highly advise reaching this point - no album is as rewarding.

Wazz, I agree with you. Of all the so-called 'Krautrock' bands, Faust are my favourite. I was lucky enough to have seen them play live last summer and it was one of the greatest musical 'events' I've ever witnessed. That's how I perceive the music of Faust - an 'organic' 'event' or work of art in progress, continually moving, never standing still.

There is something really honest and sincere in their approach to their music which is best experienced live. As with 'Trout Mask Replica', 'Faust' touches something very deep within the human psyche in a way that is profound. I think the kind of spontaneity and honesty found in Faust has been lost in contemporary music.