Allow me to put this album into context. Very broadly speaking, emo is for the sad, pop for the happy, and jazz lies not only in-between, but above and beyond...and Rick Rose Rude is for cynical Satanists who have dreams -- not nightmares -- of hell. He's far from goth, though; think about it this way: if there was a hell and this hell had a Chuck-E-Cheese, then the robotic band in the dining area would perform covers of Rick Rose Rude songs.
Rude's songs are an interesting mix of lo-fi styles. At his most complicated moments, there's just enough variation of notes to produce a hook, suggesting pop. Rude's singing, on the other hand, implies a punk rock influence. Have Faith is consistently minimalistic; if you can do it with three chords, why use a fourth? Rude's website describes the music surprisingly well (and with an unexpected lack of hyperbole): "a mixture of punk, power-pop & glitter."
Surprisingly, when it comes to the darker side of life, there seem to be a lot of things to sing about, so the songs venture beyond basic sex ("The Girl Won't Come"*), drugs ("Amphetamine Blues") and rock and roll (tracks one through 14). In "A Brian Jones Existence", he sings of the awful calamities and thoughts of one Brian Jones, whose heart is broken and who hates his job. What makes the song so great is the kitschy minimalism that exists beneath the lyrics; with just an acoustic guitar, a light drum machine, a soft bass and a solo that features a wooden recorder, the music degrades the story to the point where you find your head bobbing to the catchy chorus: "I don't want to live a Brian Jones existence / I don't wanna live my life any more." "Space Cadet" has a spacey quality; RRR sings, over and over again, "Space cadet / I want a jet / Lost in space / you have no orbit." The song seems to be about an admired friend who has no qualities to justify the admiration. Similarly, "Star Fuck" portrays the same desire of hoping to move up, out and away from personal melodrama.
On Have Faith's final track, the listener discovers that RRR isn't really from hell, and his life really isn't a rendition thereof. Going out with the lines, "I've been popping pills / Oh, I've been popping pills," the song suggests that the previous hour was nothing more than drugs and cockeyed visions. More importantly, the ending lines bring us to believe that Rude isn't saying that life is hell, so much that life is hell, but we've all gotta come down from it some time.
*For the record, this song is not really about sex, per se, but it so insinuates it.
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