‘CARE’ PACKAGE

Faith No More’s snide “We Care a Lot” is as pungent and brilliant an anthem-for-a-generation as 1987 is likely to produce. Sort of the smart-aleck antithesis of “We Are the World,” it pained-fully runs down the overloaded list of everything there is to be concerned about in modern-day America (AIDS, starvation, crack, shuttle disasters, etc.) as singer Chuck Mosely mockingly offers up blanket empathy, repeating, “It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it.”

“That was the best song we’ve ever written in the world. Now here’s one that’s almost as good,” said Mosely with candor after “Care” during Faith No More’s set Friday at Scream. And indeed, the San Francisco-based band offered no other material quite that devastating. But the quintet’s unique and refined mixture of metal guitars, funk bass, eerily beautiful synthesizer lines and punk/rap vocals redeems even the less developed numbers. And if the calculatedly obnoxious public presence seems a little phony, Faith does carry on in the early punk spirit far less embarrassingly than just about any comparable unit left around.