Faithless’s showings in the singles charts might not bag them as one of the biggest players of the 90s dance boom, but with 10 million long-players sold, they stand as one of music’s true rarities: a dance act who managed to sell albums. To view them as such, though, would be doing them a disservice. Faithless has always been a more artistic, than floor-filling, endeavour.
It’s a point which “Forever Faithless”, their 10th anniversary Best Of makes abundantly clear from the outset. The super clubs may have shut their doors, but nearly a decade after breaking Rollo, Sister Bliss and Maxi Jazz through to the mainstream, the murky thud of “Insomnia” still shivers with the same dark nocturnal passion. Like most things here, it never really fitted into the sunny, and ultimately disposable, house scene which spawned the trio themselves. Consequently, it hasn’t aged a day.
While Faithless’s extended shelf-life owes much to producer Rollo’s liking for otherworldly atmospheres and Sister Bliss’s ability to realise them, it’s voice of infinite wisdom, Maxi Jazz, who stands as their greatest asset. If the hypnotic bmp and air pushing whooshes made “God Is A DJ” a religious experience on the dance-floor, it’s practising Buddhist Jazz who turned the dank trance track into a spiritual experience off it. His impeccable diction and poetic calm have consistently added the depth, feeling and humanity. In a time of faceless DJs and two-dimensional electronics, his undulating raps brought Faithless’s sinister world alive and secured them a personality.
So strong is that personality, that their hits collection is blessed with a cohesion rare in retrospectives. “Reverence”, “Bring My Family Back”, “We Come One” and “Mass Destruction” may be from four different albums, and cover dub, trip-hop, jackboot euphoria and deep-thinking big beat, but they could have been recorded one after the other on the same day. There are no early fumblings for a sound. Faithless started fully formed and have stuck to the blueprint ever since.
Some might argue that, if anything, “Forever Faithless” shows a distinct lack of progress. But in truth, here it’s a plus. They’ve always inhabited their own dimension, and their resistance to outside influences means you don’t need the skip button to make sense of it.
