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

[#] 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 my first impressions, or read on for how they might have changed.)

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.

Essential:	"Atom City Queen", "Counterfeit Sky", "I Can See Houses"
Quintessential:	"A.M. Amnesia"
Non-Essential:	All the segues, please
Rating:
Further listening:	The Heart is a Monster's Rediscovering entry