Faith No More тоғызыншы альбомы: "Жылдың альбомы" туралы деректер

Album of the Year is the sixth studio album by American rock band Faith No More, released on June 3, 1997, by Slash and Reprise Records. It is the first album to feature the band's current guitarist Jon Hudson, and was their last studio album before their eleven year hiatus from 1998 to 2009. The album has been described by AllMusic as being "more straightforward musically than past releases." In a 1997 interview with SFGate, Gould reflected on the making of the album, saying, "Very rarely were we all in the same city at the same time. If we were lucky, there'd be a three week window, and then we'd practice as much as we could and record at the end of the period." Roddy Bottum similarly recalled that "everybody's schedule was hectic. And so it was a situation of making the record around people's other projects." Gould said after Menta's firing "the momentum just shut down and everybody went off and started doing their side stuff." Patton had written new songs while away in Italy with his wife, such as "Home Sick Home". Once recording was completed, the individual members spent time preparing for the upcoming tour in support of the album. The album's music displayed a more melancholic sound overall compared to previous releases. Gould said at the time, "it just turned out to be that way that the new material is more melodic, slower and more atmospheric. It was important for me that the album has a general mood that can be found in all songs and that it doesn't go in too many directions like we did in the past." Patton commented, "It's got more feelings and balance than our previous albums. Possibly it's darker too."

"Naked in Front of the Computer" is one of the few songs in the Faith No More catalogue written solely by Mike Patton. In the early years of online filesharing, it was sometimes incorrectly labelled as being an Incubus song, with the title of "Naked". When asked about the song's meaning, Billy Gould replied: Actually, this song is about email. Patton is kind of obsessed with the idea of how people can communicate and have relationships over the computer without talking or ever meeting. So this is an extreme version of that concept. Funny thing is the image of someone sitting naked in front of a computer might not have made sense to people a few years ago, but now everybody knows what it means. It's become part of our culture. "Pristina" is a song written about the then ongoing conflicts in the Balkans (named after the capital of Kosovo), The song was inspired by a trip Gould made to the Balkans, following a 1995 German tour with Faith No More. When interviewed by Serbian Times, he reminisced, "at that time no one in America knew what was happening there, American press didn't write about that [ ] That place left a deep impression on me." A piano based remix of the song by Gould appears on some editions of the album, along with several electronic based remixes of other songs, made by people from outside the band. Gould said of the remix, "the reason I did it was because, well, I wrote the song, and at the time, the way remixers were going, there was a certain sameness [going on]; I didn’t want to just give [the track] to some remixer who was going to turn into like some kind of industrial house music song or something." It features low, harsh synths that almost mimic a bass. Gould says, "a lot of the really cool sounds in this song that sound like guitar are actually keyboard string sounds running through a Tech 21 SansAmp. You can really mangle keyboard sounds with a SansAmp; you can get some amazing dark, ugly textures." although they ended up appearing as B sides and as bonus tracks for the Japanese edition. According to Mike Patton, "The Big Kahuna" was cut from the final track listing since it did not fit in with the rest of the album. The band recorded approximately two dozen songs during the Album of the Year sessions. However, almost no unreleased material from the sessions has ever surfaced. Patton said, "we did about 7 or 8 songs that won't appear on the album. I don't know if they will ever appear somewhere. It's like cookin' coffee you have to throw it away when it's kinda bitter. The main problem all of the time was: are the songs good enough for the album or should we write some more. it's difficult to find the right balance. First we had too many commercial songs, then there were too many heavy songs." The only unreleased outtake to have emerged is the song "Instrumental", which appeared on the 1998 compilation Who Cares a Lot?. It has often been mislabelled as being from the 1994–95 King for a Day Fool for a Lifetime era sessions, and was even included on the 2016 deluxe edition for that album.

The photograph on the front cover depicts Czechoslovakia's first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who is also regarded as the country's founding father. The album jacket depicts the funeral of Masaryk, with the words "pravda vítězí" (truth prevails), the motto of the Czech Republic, adorning his coffin. The artwork was reflected with the band frequently wearing suits during their tour in support of the album, a trend that carried over to their 2009 reunion tour. While the album sleeve did not feature printed lyrics, Mike Patton and Billy Gould did submit official lyrics to fnm. com, which was a fan controlled site prior to the band's reformation in 2009. Regarding the title Album of the Year, Bottum said in a June 14, 1997, interview with MTV Europe that "It just seemed right. We've been away for a while. Coming back with a bang or a scream seemed to be effective to us, and a little bit funny." In the same interview, Patton elaborated "I think if you can't see the humor in that, then you've got a problem." During April 1998, the band reconvened for three festival dates in Spain and Portugal. These would end up being their last shows in over 10 years, as they announced their split later that month. When the album was released in mid 1997, Mike Bordin was called in to perform with Ozzy Osbourne for that year's edition of Ozzfest, which ran from May 24 to July 1. This resulted in Robin Guy (of the band Rachel Stamp) filling in on drums for Bordin during a UK Top of the Pops performance on May 30, as well as an absence of any Faith No More shows during the month of June. Shortly after he returned from Ozzfest, the band had to cancel four July dates in Europe, so Bordin could attend the birth of his first daughter in San Francisco. The Album of the Year tour is notable for featuring Limp Bizkit, a nu metal band greatly influenced by Faith No More, as an opener for several 1997 US dates. They were frequently booed by Faith No More's fans, including during a September 1997 concert at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, where the crowd booed them off stage. In a 2013 interview, Roddy Bottum reflected on the shows with Limp Bizkit, recalling "I fought it at the time. I had to really push to get a couple bands that I liked to get on the bill in Portland and Seattle on that leg. I had no interest in the sound of Limp Bizkit. It was not how I wanted to be represented at all. Not to be snotty at all, but that guy Fred Durst had a really bad attitude. He was kind of a jerk." Durst apologized to him after this show, as he did not know that Bottum had come out as gay in the early '90s. Limp Bizkit's guitarist Wes Borland later claimed that his band were excited about the prospect of getting to tour with Faith No More, stating "the idea of it was cool [but] once we got there, it was a really tough crowd. They have a really tough crowd to please, who are very vocal about not liking you. We opened for Faith No More and Primus in the same year, and the Primus tour went a lot better than the Faith No More tour." Borland added that he did not get to know Mike Patton personally until several years later. "Ain't Talkin' 'bout Dub" by Apollo 440, "Highway Star" by Deep Purple, Will Smith's "Men in Black", Herb Alpert's "This Guy's in Love with You" and the R. Kelly songs "I Believe I Can Fly" and "Gotham City". An intro tape was used at the beginning of shows, which contained "Also sprach Zarathustra", followed by an Elvis style fanfare clip announcing Faith No More as being from Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.

The album developed praise from the wider music community following the band's initial break up in April 1998. In his retrospective review, Greg Prato of AllMusic gave the album a rating of four stars out of five and described it as being "a fitting way for one of alt rock's most influential and important bands to end its career." Stereogum referred to it as "a great album" in 2015, and pointed out there was a deeper level of maturity. They wrote "Album of the Year sounds 'mature', a blasphemous term for a band of self professed oddballs who had a reputation as crass and scatological pranksters [ ] All the humor on Album of the Year, right down to its title, feels a bit crestfallen and self deprecating, as if the band had aged a decade since King for a Day." In the PopMatters review for the 2016 deluxe edition, it is noted the album "was generally maligned as a disappointing swan song for Faith No More when it came out in 1997" and that "revisiting Album of the Year today is a more forgiving experience." In 2020, Louder Sound wrote "Album of the Year is an impressively cinematic album, full of widescreen, panoramic choruses – and Patton's smooth as satin vocals have never sounded more handsome. If you don't already own any of this band's music, though, this is not essential listening." In the same year, the magazine named it one of the 20 best metal albums of 1997. System of a Down drummer John Dolmayan listed it as an album that changed his life for a 2020 Louder Sound feature on ten life changing albums. Vocalist Kyo of Japanese band Dir En Grey named "Mouth to Mouth" one of his favorite songs. Papa Roach recorded a cover of "Naked in Front of the Computer", with it appearing as a B side for their 2002 single "She Loves Me Not". Despite sharing the same title, Papa Roach's song "She Loves Me Not" was not a cover of the Faith No More song from Album of the Year. Patton criticized this era of Faith No More in late 1990s and early 2000s interviews, with comments such as "[We split] Because we were starting to make bad music. And that's when you need to pull the plug. Our next record would have been a piece of shit." Mike Bordin reflected on the album on its 25th anniversary in 2022, saying, "I did probably, deep down, expect that to be the last album, because I was contributing to it while I was on tour with Ozzy, which wasn’t a bad thing – I was grateful to be doing both. I was grateful that Bill was spending so much time in his laboratory, cooking things up. I liked the songs. I liked the performances. I liked what we were doing. I felt good about the album, and I was happy with how it came out."

As of 2015, the album had sold 221,000 copies in the US. This nearly matched the total for King for a Day Fool for a Lifetime but was a significantly lower figure than that of the other two albums featuring Mike Patton on vocals. On other charts, it fared much better. In Australia, it topped the ARIA charts on June 28, 1997, before being overtaken by Savage Garden's self titled album on July 4, 1997. It went Platinum in the country for sales of more than 70,000 copies. It also topped the albums chart in New Zealand. The album only had slight impact in the UK charts but it did go gold for sales of more than 100,000 copies.

+Release history and formats for Album of the YearRegionDateFormatLabelUnited StatesJune 3, 1997 CDSlash/RepriseCanadaJune 3, 1997CD Slash/RepriseJapanJune 6, 1997CD with 2 bonus tracksSlash/LondonEuropeJune 9, 1997CD with 6 bonus tracksSlash/LondonUnited Kingdom2×CDSlash/LondonGermany2×CDSlash/LondonNetherlands2×CDSlash/LondonAustraliaJune 19, 19972×CDPolydor/Slash/LondonEurope1999CDSlash/LondonEurope2003CDWarner Bros./SlashEuropeAugust 23, 2013VinylMusic On Vinyl/SlashVariousSeptember 9, 20162×CD/VinylSlash/Rhino

Initial pressings of the Australian, UK, German and Dutch versions of the album included a bonus remix disc. It was reissued on CD across Europe in 1999, and then again in 2003 by Warner Bros. Records. Album of the Year would be the second album in the band's discography to be re released by Dutch music label Music On Vinyl after Angel Dust. Released on August 26, 2013, the album had a limited pressing run of 2000 hand numbered copies on gold vinyl, as well as on black vinyl which remains available in some retailers. Album of the Year was released as a deluxe edition on 2016 with two discs; the second disc contains eight bonus tracks.