Failure Album Recommendations: "Fantastic Planet"

Album Recommendations: Fantastic Planet

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that 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

[#] Fantastic Planet (1996)

The hermit's opus.

Reviewed June 6, 2024

There is no "lost classic" that has been made quite as visible as Fantastic Planet. Home-recorded on ADAT and heroin (listen close for the sound of a spoonful getting cooked on "Dirty Blue Balloons"), released on a label swallowed up by mergers with no promotion, followed by a band breakup and spread by word of mouth to a new generation of enthusiastic fans, Fantastic Planet has all the makings of a lost classic story, and everyone's already told you about it if you follow lost classics. A concept record paralleling withering into drugs to floating off into the vacuum of space, Fantastic Planet seems daunting at 17 tracks, but it's the deadly consistent songwriting that never flags and the precision of its arrangements that keeps your attention throughout.

Fantastic Planet is written to be an epic. It's effectively in three movements, separated by the now-tiresome "segue" tracks. The first movement puts the most immediate songs upfront, and each one further grows more diffuse, heavy, droning. Never-resolving, phased guitar and Ken Andrews' hushed, ashamed vocals make the top-notch "Blank" an absolutely miserable comfort. Fuzz bass and drum loops twist off into the sun on "Another Space Song". "Heliotropic" soon segues into a solo so strained, it sounds like skidding tires. Never is it indulgent. Even the somewhat out of place "Stuck on You" follows its own lyrics, possibly about a relationship, possibly about opioids, but nominally about itself—"I claimed I didn't care for you/But your verse got trapped inside my head/Over and over again/You played yourself to death in me". Expect the rest of the album to follow suit.