I think this comes back to the age old question, do you judge an artist by their best or worst work.
To be honest a bunch of the early Real Thing era stuff is pretty cringe worthy. Patton frequently discussed how he was 19 and acted how he thought he was supposed to. Whereas a bunch of stuff from Angel Dust, through King for a Day tour is not, in my opinion. Which explains why Angel Dust was deliberate “career suicide”, but then ended up on a lot of Best Album of the 90s lists.
I think the King for a Day era and tour was some great rock music.
Just to be clear folks who can stand them, I’m not trying to convince you, or particularly care about your opinion, this is for folks who remember Epic, hated it (totally reasonable) but missed later stuff. Which 30 years later is probably no one
But there’s one thing about this band that I think crawls up the butt of some people, the wilful lack of sincerity from Patton. It’s all surface, to be honest I can’t tell if anything he’s done has anything behind it than ironic detachment. Something that separates him and say Yow, who on stage are similar performers.
