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

[#] The Heart is a Monster (2015)

If you want to score a movie, just score a movie.

Reviewed October 10, 2020

(This is an album that was previously covered on the Rediscovering! Click the link in the table to read a wordier and possibly less accurate version of my feelings on this album.)

Failure's legend status was cemented by 2014. A tiny reunion show at an L.A. theater sold out literally within seconds. The hunger was there for not just Ken, Greg, and Kellii, now clean and also fathers, to return as Failure, but to produce new material as Failure. The Heart is a Monster is definitely intended as a fan pleaser, reimagining and officially releasing two vintage outtakes from different chunks of the Golden set and continuing on the space themes and segues established on Fantastic Planet. As a big Failure fan, does it please? Well. When you get actual songs, absolutely. When you get cinematic interlude bullshit, hell the fuck no. The pacing of this album is horrendous, but when you take the individual tracks on their own, you remember why you liked Failure.

This is a much different Failure than from twenty years prior, now with, like, actual industry experience and shit, so the sonics are much slicker, and unfortunately, the segues are more numerous. These six segue tracks (out of eighteen total) tend to consist of ambient noises and acoustic noodling and do nothing other than sit in your ears for a minute while the band loads another song into the sequencer. What balances out all the mercurial masturbation is that the tunes between them are damn strong. "Atom City Queen" has about the nastiest guitar line you could ask for in a Failure song, the updated "I Can See Houses" builds and falls just like the plane in its lyrics, and "Counterfeit Sky" and "Hot Traveler" hit hard despite their black ice production. It's the pacing that kills this one for me. Not a bad record, just last on my list.

[#] Golden (2004)

Outtakes as good as the legit songs.

Reviewed June 11, 2024

An outtakes album floats roughly around "techno remix EP" on the list of things people don't want from rock bands, but that didn't stop the then-posthumous Failure from realizing what they had and delivering unto us Golden in 2004. Self-released through CD Baby, Golden is a DVD/CD combo set of music videos, a documentary covering the band's original run in the 90s, and what we're interested in, a sequenced record of songs that didn't make it onto their proper three albums. It might sound incredibly vain for a no-hit-wonder 90s rock outfit, but truth be told, I'd rather take Golden than some of the lesser Failure records. What by all accounts should be chaff is actually Failure at their catchiest, grimiest, and most haunting—and maybe Failure having a laugh, if you listen until the end.

Songs from Failure's earliest recording sessions (fretless bass and vaguely gothic guitars in tow), Comfort rehearsals, apartment demos never re-recorded for Magnified, and the poppiest song attempted for Fantastic Planet all feature on Golden. I'm especially surprised about the Magnified outtakes—the title track has possibly the nastiest bass tone I've ever heard in its bridge, and songs like "Mange" ("Found a dog downstairs/Locked him with the bikes/Cried 'til he went hoarse/Scratched the door to shreds") and "Lucky Shoreline" ("Brought her back okay/She's dead/But nothing's missing") are thick with the kinds of grim, dissonant bleakness you love to hear from Failure. These are not presented in chronological order, and their sequencing helps give such disparate sounds, recording styles, and eras a feeling of cohesion. All credit due—when Failure makes an outtakes album, the emphasis is still on the album.

[#] 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.

[#] Magnified (1994)

As fun as songs about car crashes and arsons get.

Reviewed April 28, 2018

Pity the sophomore album. You either strike out and people stop caring, or you come out with The Pants-Pissingly Perfect Third Album and people stop caring. The latter fate has befallen Magnified, the sophomore record from 90s cult heroes Failure. When people talk about Failure, they're usually referring to Fantastic Planet, the cinematic space-themed concept album about heroin that offered atmosphere where most went punk, but I think Magnified has the edge over it. If Fantastic Planet is Failure in low earth orbit, Magnified is Failure out by the dumpsters behind the mall—an all-encompassing, firey burnout, overdose, and rebirth in the same album.

What puts the album above most forgotten 90s alt-rock efforts is the way each song is structured. Swarthes of Magnified are propelled by dissonant chordal bass that doesn't groove so much as it quakes. Just look at "Frogs", which is the best song about lobotomies since "Lady Godiva's Operation". "Undone" is a tall highlight, marrying themes of sexual deviancy and abuse over noise pop hysteria. Throughout, the songs remain as tight as ever, with only the bleak, monochrome closer "Small Crimes" having a sense of sprawl. How fitting that a track about arson burns like uncontrolled wildfire. It's not a happy listen, but Magnified is deeply satisfying—and sorely-overlooked.

[#] 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.