or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

The first thing I recall thinking when I put this album on the turntable was this: "This is some fucked-up shit. Awe-inspiringly fucked-up, even." Granted, it had little on its predecessor, The Faust Tapes, in terms of genuinely bizarre juxtapositions -- think coruscating synthesizers layered atop bleating saxophones, atonal, herky-jerky guitars, at least one moaning, babbling vocalist and tons of found-sound ephemera, often all going on at once, or seeming to, pureed to near-perfection -- and befuddling hey-where'd-that-go-and-what-seems-to-be-taking-place-here edits (in which respect it seems to resemble the spacily harsh, seemingly cocaine-inspired mixing of records like Cabaret Voltaire's The Covenant, The Sword, and The Arm of the Lord). Some would even say, as I later learned, that this was a watered-down version of the Faust listening experience, one streamlined and compressed into what would seemingly be as close to the band ever got to pop. This made sense, or a sort of sense, when I relistened to the immediate standout track, "Jennifer," a near-folk ballad distinguished by its swollen bass and meandering synthesizer hook, but then there was the matter of its latter half being entirely swallowed up by an out-of-control synthesizer, after which came some unwieldy piano playing that went on for a good two minutes. By the time the song had ended and the next, "Just a Second (Starts Like That)," had begun, only to soon collapse into its own transmissions-from-beyond freeform nightmare, I was beginning to doubt the half-sense this had made not long before. This, after all, was not the sort of stuff -- and it was strong, heady stuff indeed -- a group with pop aspirations would make.

Or was it? Maybe this Faust, a long-haired and copiously bearded gang who apparently hung out in an abandoned schoolhouse for five years or so swallowing up record-company money while producing some sprawling, multi-volume masterwork whose ambitions seem a deranged hybrid of Zappa and Kraftwerk, were intent on destroying pop and rewriting its own rules. But then this seems to me, even today, too simplistic an explanation, like neatly ascribing the incandescent chaos of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders' "Om" to the purported fact that one or both of them were tripping heavily while in the studio. Rather, I've chosen to assume that Faust are part of pop, and on this album they managed (or at least I think they managed) to write some puzzling and often beautiful songs adorned, here and there, with the devices of otherness.

This "otherness" is something I realized, not long ago, unifies a lot of my interests. Maybe it's the baffling production-values of Doctor Who reruns (wherein Kronos, God of Time, appears as a man dressed in what looks like a white Batman costume and spray-painted helmet, while the camera does that whole Jefferson-Airplane-on-Ed-Sullivan zoom-in-and-out effect and moogs go ballistic in the background somewhere [other episodes sometimes indicate Beck took notes before directing his "Sexx Laws" video]), or the disorienting fold-in-on-itself metafictional devices of authors like Donald Barthelme, the nightmarish ketchup-and-dildo unconscious leakage of Paul McCarthy, "Space Ghost: Coast to Coast," and of course the music of Faust. Intentionally or not, all these things I'm often enraptured with for some weird reason never fail to blow my mind. They're just, well, weird as fuck. The problem, though, is when the erosion of time interferes -- maybe, as John Waters has often stated when referring to his own lunatic-fringe vision of Americana (which is maybe what Faust tried to do, in their own the-inmates-have-taken-over-the-asylum way, with postwar Germany's culture), the mainstream moves closer to its alienated spawn, or maybe the mindblowing somehow becomes flat and hokey.

Not so, this, with Faust. The album opener, "Krautrock," often cited as a gentle mockery of bands like Neu! that emerges as virtually identical to the long-winded subjects it's doing an impression of, still sounds downright befuddling, like the bridge from Gary Numan's "Cars" hopped up on some new laboratory-bred type of amphetamines. Built from gliding layers of keyboard that somehow manage to sound, by turns, furious and majestic, it's a mind-blower. Unlike Kraftwerk, who've managed to sound dated and then not-dated every few years, I can't imagine this music ever sounding anything but downright terrifyingly enigmatic. Somehow, the unexpected opener to "The Sad Skinhead" (which I don't want to ruin for those who haven't heard this album; let it suffice to say that it's a bit of tape-manipulation that I don't recommend hearing while walking down a desolate street late at night with headphones on) manages to top this, before the song unfolds into a pastiche of reggae and Beefheartian guitar, its lyrics an oddly bemused chronicle of interpersonal difficulties between, I guess, some shaven-cranium pals who lament the dissolution of a wonderful relationship "Going places / Smashing faces / What else could we do?", as goes a chorus too melodic and downright silly to anticipate punk, except perhaps the loopier moments of the Swell Maps.

"Picnic on a Frozen River, Deuxieme Tableaux" rewrites a song from an earlier album, only adding aggressive rhythms and mutating into a full-blown prog piece with a time-signature that the Mothers of Invention could only have dreamed up. This is juxtaposed against the relatively gentle "Giggy Smile," sung partly in French; at this time, the listener begins to realize this album is like some kind of movie that requires subtitles in every country it's played in. Nonetheless, a great one, a record that refuses to become any less disjointed and opaque the more you listen to it. I wouldn't have it any other way.