Artist: Faces, The
Label: Warner Bros. Records
Released: 1970
Length: 47.52
Rating: 3/5
“First Step” is the debut album from the legendary British blues rock quintet Faces, born from the ashes of Small Faces, one of the most eye-catching R & B outfits of the ’60s. With names like Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and Kenney Jones on the sleeve, this first record promised a lot, but it ended up weighed down by a sizable dose of almost childlike naivety and an approach that’s far too often vague, and it quickly got stuck in gray mediocrity. The lukewarm reaction from critics matched, which says plenty about the fact that even eminent names in music don’t get roses thrown at their feet every step of the way.
It’s worth pointing out that a big chunk of the Faces debut is busy kneading together improvised ideas that often have neither head nor tail, and rarely does anything all that exciting come out of them. Across the whole run of the boldly served-up half-baked pieces “Pinneapple and the Monkey” and “Looking Out the Window”, you get a whole parade of riffs, unfinished melodic ideas and awkwardly placed rhythmic breaks that only rarely grow into a fully formed, more substantial song. That of course backs up the claim that in this early stage of their development, Faces spent most of their time figuring out the expressive approach that suited them, the one that would rocket them to rock superstardom in the years that followed. There’s no shortage of individual quality here, but it arrives sporadically, often in forms and moods that clash, like on “Around the Plynth”, where the fire and fervor of Wood’s slide playing is obvious, yet it never finds a proper sparring partner in a Rod Stewart who’s in great spirits and thrills with his “full-throttle bellowing”.
“First Step” does have its moments, of course. Not exactly meticulous, but hot enough, is the album’s opener, a cover of the famous “Wicked Messenger”. Faces played a sly “joke” with it, as Dylan’s creation, set against a gloomy bluesy musical backdrop, quickly picks up an unexpectedly epic connotation. Much more typical of Faces is what follows with “Devotion” and “Nobody Knows”, when the album anchors itself in serene soul waters for a few priceless moments. A pleasant but rather dispensable parody country ditty, “Stone”, kindly shields us from the threat of any thrilling musical discoveries, while “Shake, Shudder” builds on a rather naive filing down of the band’s basic guiding principles of blues rock speech. The track makes no secret of its enthusiasm for reviving the legacy of British blues and rock coexisting, maybe even of the r & b movement at times, which, successfully carried over into new creative frames, shines at full power in the favorite “Flying”.
“First Step” doesn’t campaign for a musical revolution, but the album still serves up enough distinctive musicianship that you wouldn’t mistake it for some sneaky continuation of the Small Faces saga. Rod Stewart and company had their own vision of what would happen next from the very start, and it had little to do with nostalgia, in fact quite the opposite. The band’s creative zenith, which was actually just around the corner, ran almost exclusively along the tried-and-tested lines of the ideas and notions of the Scottish songbird.
Lineup
Rod Stewart: vocals
Ronnie Wood: guitar, harmonica
Ian McLagan: piano, organ
Ronnie Lane: bass, backing vocals
Kenney Jones: drums
Production
The Faces
Tracklist
1. The Wicked Messenger
2. Devotion
3. Shake, Shudder, Shiver
4. Stone
5. Around The Plynth
6. Flying
7. Pineapple and the Monkey
8. Nobody Knows
9. Looking Out The Window
10. Three Button Hand Me Down
