Track By Track: Faux Pas - 'I Feel Pretty, So Should You'
Manchester-based grunge four-piece Faux Pas recently released their new EP ‘I Feel Pretty, So Should' You’, a visceral exploration of intimate pain, and highlighting shared vulnerability as a tool against suicide. They talked us through the record track by track.
I would like to extend my immense gratitude to everyone else in the band for their work on this record. These guys have given me the tools to turn the most painful moments of my life into something really beautiful and I will always be grateful for that. This record helped us come together in a way that I don’t think DIY bands do often enough, I cannot listen to the record without seeing their beautiful faces, lots of love.
Ru
This Will Kill You
I think this song serves as a bit of a goodbye, both in terms of the musicality and the themes. It’s not really anything new or surprising from us it’s just a kind of really tight three minute pop song that has a really 90’s esque beef to it, there's a lot of emphasis on this dialogue between the guitars and the vocals which I think had become a bit of a staple. It just kind of rips through without a lot of restraint as if to say, “well if this is what you expected then fuck it have it all” before ending with a really sombre moment. I think leading up to (and including) this track, the band operated in a really naive way when it came to songwriting, everything was loud, clinical and very bratty with a lack of composure. So with that in mind the moment of solitude at the end of this track is a way of signifying the death of that side of the band.
Thematically speaking the ep was intended to feel like a look inside my head as I reflected and processed trauma that had led to suicidal urges. This Will Kill You is kind of like the moment where I gave in and let go. I was finding it really hard to be in contact with people without fantasising about being publicly humiliated and brutalised. This wasn’t actually the first song written for the record, so by the time we wrote this I was already on my knees, and this is about finding a way to voice that helplessness. I’m kind of babbling on but I guess to put it bluntly this is an admission of exhaustion, I had caused a lot of pain to my parents and to those around me and I wanted to disappear, I have always felt like there was someone else in my head who hated me and at the time I was struggle to juggle both.
Bliss
Being as grand and narcissistic as possible this transition is a representation of my dissociation with my present surroundings and need to stay inside my head and work things out. I like to think it kind of feels like someone slowly losing grip of someone's hand like in one of those movies, slipping off into an abyss that initially seems comforting before the horror sinks in. I guess in literal terms it’s a moment where I decided to confront my shit in therapy, which is nice in the sense that I hadn’t given myself much time to process my pain, but to do so effectively would mean hitting the nasty parts.
If I Could
The first real song of the record whoooo. This is hugely inspired by bands like Boogarins and Wand, for me it’s more about the texture rather than a super catchy hook and shit like that. In this song there’s a lot of discussion about addiction, domination and humiliation. I think the track has a really cool kind of locked in feeling where it just feels like it marches on and drags you through, reminiscent of the cyclical nature of my relationship with my diet and substance abuse. Lyrically I guess i’m trying to be honest about my want to self medicate through drug taking. Drugs had become a form of escapism for me, but by this point I felt like I was being completely dominated by them, a domination that was familiar with the bullying I had experienced as a kid. As I grew up this would turn into body dysmorphia and social anxiety. The track shows the relief you get at the start of an addiction before turning sour and ultimately destroying your mind. By this point in my life it was contributing hugely to my social anxieties and choking the shit out of me.
Hey! Antoine
It’s kind of like a really innocent child like dream, think carnival or some shit. I was finding it really hard to think with any kind of clarity during this point, mostly because every session I had it felt like I was pulling up major trees, so there wasn’t a lot of respite. At the time of writing this song my mother and father were separating. For me this resonated a lot with the way in which a previous father figure of mine (a guy called Mike) had slipped out of my life. Mike was everything to me when I was young, I didn’t know my biological father but he was everything and he gave me so much. So yeah when my mum and dad split i felt like holy shit this is happening again. I had really repressed a lot of those emotions and not processed anything properly since I was like seven. So the song represents me processing that initial separation (trying to do so from a place of serenity), the sudden end with a moment of numb solace, and these recurring feelings that could not be ignored a second time around. The big finish is about confronting this childhood rage, the years that followed and a desperation for it not to happen again, hence the phrase I wish.
Gorilla man
So this song shaped the ep in a lot of ways, I had it for quite a long time before showing anyone (blah blah blah the kind of sensitive drug addled songwriter bullshit you always hear) but this is fucking real for me. I wrote it as a love song for my father, a really beautiful guy named Andy who gave me so much and was a huge pillar of stability for
me, at a time where I was really worried about him (a result of poor mental hygiene, drug use and some other background stuff). The original song was just a solo venture and it felt like a whimper, real delicate and intimate. But there was a point in writing the record where I was really struggling to move forward, there were tonnes of ideas coming out but it wouldn’t line up and it felt like everything was just really chaotic without a real direction. This song was really precious and we decided to re-work it into the EP and make it a real focal point for the record both thematically and music, sort of like the moment where it tips over the edge. It’s just incredibly simple, I compare the influence of my biological father and my dad in two halves. The first half I admit to a truth I was afraid to do so for a while which was bluntly, I was unwanted by my biological father. In the second I look to my dad and try to express my immense admiration for who he is and how he has affected me in a moment where I feared for him. It is about taking ownership of my truth and revelling in the vulnerability of doing so, something I worked at a lot in therapy.
Boss Fight
So this is the biggy. To me I always imagine this song like a scene in a movie where someone is driving to a quiet place where they can take their life, and thinking everything through on the way, you know rain pouring, tears flowing, probably pissed. Anyway that’s my super theatrical take. This song represents the most crucial point in my life where I was processing everything that was going on and deciding whether or not I wanted to continue, I had a really bad relapse where I was alone in the house and doing a lot of coke again and I was really struggling to move forward. I guess in hindsight it’s kind of like me weighing up the consequences. I thought a lot about my best friend joe and how it would affect him, and I have a really burning memory where i told my mother at a show I felt suicidal, and she said “you can’t do that reub you’ll break my heart” and then I just started pissing tears. I dunno the first half just builds and builds to show the inner conflict I felt.
The song then moves on to the last couple of things I needed to accept. I struggled socially for a really long time and when I was younger I could never find a reason that genuinely resonated with me. I had repressed an experience of sexual abuse that had completely changed the way I interacted with people, this lead to me repressing my gender identity until I was 22. The shame I felt for who I was was so intertwined with what happened, and everything that happened afterwards that it became clear that I needed to take ownership over my identity and trauma to be able to move forward, and I think the middle section of the song perfectly represents that. Like I said before, I was always aware that there was someone else in my head who I was restraining out of fear, but this lead to self destructive tendencies, so a big part of the song for me is about trying to make peace with this otherness in my character and trying to help her get some airtime.
The song ends with a really simple declaration, and in doing so shows that I need to make peace with my past and my identity to move forward. I was hugely influenced by
Dave Grohl in my younger years and when I first heard “Walk” (Which I know some people will groan about) him screaming “I never wanna die” really struck me, I just felt as if it was one of the most genuine displays of humanity I had ever heard, so I like to think in a way that this little reference to it is a way of reaching into my childhood and offering reassurance to the kid I was. (Again being narcissistic and theatrical) but I guess try to visualise the end like this guy has parked up and just revels in the sunrise.
Just a thought
I guess cos Boss Fight ends on a bit of a cliffhanger this is supposed to be a moment of ambiguity, everything simmers and just kind of fades to black.
Alternate Ending
So the original end for the EP was supposed to be Boss Fight, you know go out with a bang, be super dramatic etc. When I was younger I became so obsessed with my idols that I felt like the were my friends, particularly when I didn’t really have any, so when I was really struggling I had the incredibly unoriginal idea to make the record (with Boss Fight as the end) and then just let go. I know this is dramatic in hindsight, and cynical people will say “get a grip” (i’m cynical as fuck and in writing this I’m saying it) but if i’m being honest that’s how I felt at the time. The idea for the track first came about when I found out my brother was going to be having a baby. At the time I was told I was staying with my mother after a string of relapses. I spoke with my mother about my fantasies of ending the record and I remember her saying something about how that little girl will never get to meet you. I reflected on this for a few days, and it felt like the best way to proceed was to accept everything, confront my shame and try to reflect love as often as possible. Me and my brother struggled to get on a lot when we were younger, but I felt like there was something really poetic in the idea that somewhere in the future, I could have a relationship with this little girl and hopefully she would be proud of me. This motivated me to stop taking drugs, start taking care of myself more and not to give in to those thoughts, to put it bluntly. I reference the friction between my brother and I, how I accept him, how I hope he accepts me and my desire to push forward throughout, with the chorus representing great personal growth. It also has my favourite line of the ep in ‘I will own my selfish state as a whore, cos that makes me evil” to me it just perfectly sums up an acceptance for what I need to do as a person to be better. Anyways that's the end, but yeah it felt more important to end the ep on a positive note, I think it would have been easier to end with the big bang but i really feel it just drifts off on something more thought provoking and poignant this way.