Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Failure

[#] Comfort (1992)

A thrash about an unfinished basement.

Reviewed June 6, 2024

"The vocals are too quiet." "The drums are too over-the-top." These are the common complaints about Failure's debut, 1992's Comfort. Recorded in the scenic hills of Cannon Falls, Minnesota at a studio where Nirvana would do some stuff a year later, the mixture of notorious studio perfectionists Failure and notorious record button presser Steve Albini is definitely a funny one, and led to apparently neither party being satisfied with the results. I think they're all crazy. Comfort is a sick, quick ride through noise rock abandon that, no, doesn't much resemble later Failure, but certainly captures their cinematic tendencies at an embryonic stage—and it just plain sounds cool too.

Early Failure drummer Robert Gauss has been given much props by bandmates Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards over the years for influencing Failure's future drum arrangements. These bruise, crack, miss beats, and never quite play straight, and it's everything to Comfort. The instruments have all been experimented with—the feedback wails come from Albini's all-aluminum Veleno and Greg's bass had the frets removed to simulate his then-favorite Wal—and meek vocals or not, it all comes out to stomp hard on the dramatic buildups in "Macaque" and "Screen Man" and on the catchy, creepy vignettes about being turgid for the apocalypse ("Pro-Catastrophe"), child predators ("Princess"), and whatever the hell happens on "Muffled Snaps". Oh, those glorious drums.