An overlap of quality can be found the further back you go into the budding bands of the 1960s. Small Faces and The Jeff Beck Group split, but also assimilated into one another to create Faces. Their debut album, First Step, is about as smart as it gets for the group. A title which suggests it’s the first of many works to come, but also a nod to their roots as a band birthed out of two others and the influence of everything from The Beatles to handbooks from Geoffrey Sisley. You can see it on the front cover and hear it in practice throughout First Step, a solid piece of work. Such is the case for many albums from the 1960s, where the standard rock and roll is performed well. It’s the voices you hear from this time, crucially, what they would get up to later down the line, that’s of interest here. Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart would go on to form some all-time great works, but little of it is found during their time in Faces.
That’s not to say First Step is poor quality, it’s far from that. Opener Wicked Messenger is a song close to powerhouse quality, with the rock and roll tropes right there for the taking. Stewart showcases his truly unique voice, a consistent charm of this album and a reliable tool in the decades to follow. Part of the charm is hearing an alternative to the squeaky-clean sounds of those pop acts of the time, The Beatles included, who could throw a rough-sounding thrill at listeners in the later stages, but would have to build towards it. For Stewart, it’s his starting point. Even the loved-up ballads, like Devotion, are turned into thrills with his deeper vocal charms. Heavy on the blues those first two songs may be, it’s as complete a compilation of their influences and experiences in other bands as anything else on the album. Nice touches the whole way through.
Instrumentally, these songs are earmarked by a very welcome quality that Wood and Kenney Jones on drums bring. Ronnie Lane, too, whose bass on Devotion is the glue holding the song together, is a credit to the album. It’s hard not to love the blues rock found throughout First Step, specifically Shake, Shudder, Shiver, because of how much Wood’s style fits already with what would work for The Rolling Stones. That blues rock overlap is bettered by Stewart’s vocal strengths, of course. Lane takes on the lead vocal for Stone and gives the album its first jittering moment, a chance for Faces to follow in the footsteps of Bob Dylan. It doesn’t work. Around the Plynth is a bit all over the place too, even if you can hear the purpose of the song, it just doesn’t work all that well. Flying is a borderline standout but never quite gets there, though it’s worth returning to on occasion.
Instrumental pieces like Pineapple and the Monkey are thoroughly enjoyable. Just enough of a spin to stand out from the rest of 1960s’ blues rock boom. A great time is had with First Step and not just because of the heavy-hitting names found in the personnel of this album. It certainly has an effect, with the Hammond organ thrills of Pineapple and the Monkey a classy moment from the band. But their thematics, their transition from song to song, is a bit all over the place. Understandable it may be that in their early years Faces don’t know what thematic route to take, it does make First Step a bit of a shaky one. Solid fun to be had but it drifts too far from what it starts as, a promising blues rock experience. Instead, it begins to shift into instrumental excess that plays well with the rest of the genre, but the whole point of Faces was becoming a soft alternative to what was already available. They don’t quite make good on that.
