Even When I'm Alone, I Hear Your Mellow Drone- On Failure, breakups, and reunion bootlegs
I think I was roughly about two years late to the party when
it came to Failure.
And probably, even by the time I bought Fantastic Planet on CD at Best Buy in the spring of 1997, I’m
guessing that they had already fallen apart by then. Sometimes I am uncertain
if I’ve invented a memory as a convenient way to explain something, or if it
really happened this way, but I am 99% confident that I heard the band’s song,
“Stuck on You,” used in something advertising something for the 1997 MTV Movie
Awards—I want to say it was for one of the nominations for “Best Kiss,” but
again, I’m not sure if this really happened or if I have just fabricated this.
It would make sense though, wouldn’t it? A song called
“Stuck on You” being used as background music while two A-List Hollywood actors
smooch?
Anyway, at 14, Fantastic
Planet was, like, way too much for me. I couldn’t get into it at the time,
but for some reason, I re-discovered it about a year later, sitting in my
bedroom, playing Twisted Metal 2 for
Playstation, listening to the record over and over again on my stereo as I
drove around, shot at other drivers, and crashed into things.
In the early ages of the Internet, using AOL and a dial up
connection, I tried to find out all I could about Failure once I had fully
embraced Fantastic Planet. Eventually, I surmised that they had
disbanded, and only later on did I learn that it was primarily due to bassist
and lyricist Greg Edwards’ debilitating addiction to heroin. Their “swan song,”
if you will, was not Fantastic Planet,
but instead, a fitting cover of the Depeche Mode song “Enjoy The Silence,”
appearing on a D.M. tribute album entitled For
The Masses.
Because of my obsession with the band, I picked up their two
earlier albums—the ramshackle, Steve Albini engineered Comfort, and then the proto-Fantastic
Planet space rock of Magnified. I
also started looking into the band’s current projects at that time—Edwards
would resurface in 2001 as part of the trio Autolux, but it was lead vocalist
and guitarist Ken Andrews that stayed busy with production work, and eventually
went on to form various solo projects and a new band in 2002 called Year of The
Rabbit.
In song “So Far Around The Bend” by The National, the
protagonist of the song says she “prays for Pavement to get back together.” I
guess after learning of Failure’s demise, I never really spent a lot of time
wondering if or hoping that they would ever reunite. In 2004, Edwards and
Andrews curated a DVD of miscellaneous footage recorded from the band’s
history, released along with a CD of 4-track demos, album outtakes, and
soundcheck recordings.
In 2010, the band issued Fantastic
Planet on vinyl for the first time—a gorgeous, incredible sounding 2XLP
set, but again, a reunion was just never something that I gave any thought to.
Rumblings of the Failure reunion started in October of last
year when the band suddenly had a legit Facebook page—and everyone collectively
shat themselves when the cover photo for the page simply said “Failure Twenty
Fourteen.” Shortly after that, it was announced that they had reunited and
would be performing live dates in California in February, with ambiguous talks
of new material and a national tour.
Failure’s first reunion show was on the 13th, and
because the Internet, within a day or two, a bootleg recording of it surfaced.
Some may consider me a die-hard fan of a lot of bands, but
one thing I don’t really fuck with a ton are bootleg recordings of live shows.
In this modern age that we are currently living in, the “new bootleg” has
become shitty You Tube snippets taken on somebody’s mobile phone, uploaded the
day after the show. And the idea of listening to a recording of a live show
brings to mind the halcyon days of file sharing—downloading anything and
everything on Audio Galaxy, only to find the songs I had downloaded were not
the album version, but a poorly recorded live bootleg, complete with crowd
conversations.
So it was with some
reservation that I went into listening to this recording, and also, it was with
some work on my part to even be able to listen to it. The original source files
were .FLAC, which for those of you that do not know, is an incredibly high quality
audio file. And because I only choose to listen to music on my computer for
convenience when it comes to writing these pieces, I don’t have a program that
readily plays .FLAC files.
And that meant I had to use the audio editing software
Audacity to covert them to WAV files, because I only have the free version of
Audacity that doesn’t let you convert them directly to mp3. And so once I was
rid of the .FLACs, and had a desktop full of WAVs, I then opened up each one in
Garage Band—yes, I know, a crude program, but one I am comfortable using never
the less—and I began to tinker with them to remove some of the dead space
between songs (as well as the table talk in between songs) as well as adjusting
the audio so the quality was slightly easier on my ears. Once I did all of
THAT, I saved them all as mp3s for ease and convenience of listening to my
computer.
Basically, I’m a big huge loser, and while my wife was
working overtime at her very important job, I was spending my Saturday evening
parked on my living room floor, watching my companion rabbits do the things
they do, converting 18 audio files.
But now this brings us to the bootleg in question. The
original recording, while palatable, still suffered from the relatively typical
bootleg pitfalls of things being really bass heavy, and the whole thing
sounding kind of cavernous and distant. Not that I’m any kind of savant when it
comes to this stuff—I mean, I did work in my college A/V Department for 3.5
years—but really, I was just trying to make things a tad bit clearer sounding.
So wait—this is still an album review, I think. Not a play
by play of my teen years listening to Fantastic
Planet, and my dumb adult life converting audio files.
Listening to this recording is, in a word, incredibly
exciting.
It’s also incredibly raw sounding, and at times, unhinged.
As a studio act, Failure relied heavily on overdubs and multiple tracks—thus
creating rather complex and densely layered material. Operating live as a
three-piece with drummer Kellii Scott, all the songs are stripped down to their
core, with Andrews and Edwards switching off between guitar and bass, along
with some minor keyboard work. So it’s a tad jarring at first to hear the
paired down versions of songs I’ve known so well one way for so long, but it’s
also refreshing.
The songs never really get away from them, per se, but I
mean, it’s been like 17 years since they were operating as a function live
band, so there are some moments where Andrews doesn’t quite hit the notes he’s
reaching for, or the guitar seems a tad out of tune or off. But that’s okay,
because if you are listening to a Failure bootleg, you can probably forgive
them for any minor cock-ups.
I would stop short of saying that their setlist plays like a
“greatest hits” collection, because for a band that had three albums before
dissolving, they stick primarily to material from Fantastic Planet, only sprinkling in four tracks from Magnified, and saving an eight-minute
version of “Screen Man,” from their 1992 debut Comfort, as the final song of the encore.
The band sounds like they are having a blast though—the
small amounts of stage banter with the crowd are funny, and the songs never
come off as phoned in. The crowd also seems genuinely happy to be there—huge
cheers start as the band rips right into the slow burning opening track
“Another Space Song,” and I can’t even begin to imagine the rush that you would
feel from hearing the opening riff to “Stuck on You.” And overall, the songs
are heavy, doc. Failure aren’t really a “hard rock” band—even though their
paling around with Tool in the mid-90s certainly would lead you to believe
otherwise. I’ve always considered them to be “Space Rock,” mostly because Fantastic Planet is a record about
alienation, heroin addiction, and space travel. You could call Failure “alt
rock” if you wanted, but they always had a heavier sound, and in a live
setting, they let it show for sure.
Due to my crippling concert anxiety, and overall
curmudgeonly attitude about most things, seeing bands that I even have the
slightest passing interest in coming through the Twin Cities area has turned
into: “Oh, such and such is touring? Are they coming through—oh yes, yes, they
are playing in Minneapolis. Well, I’m sure as shit not going to go to that so
why am I even looking at this?” However, there is a very small list of artists
I would break my “no new concerts” rule for—a Failure reunion tour is obviously
one of them.
I’ve never written a review of a bootleg recording before,
and this has obviously turned into more of a thing about my history with a band
that’s super important to me. Basically, if you are a fan of Failure, you
should try to track down a recording of their first reunion show. If you aren’t
aware of Failure as a band, then you maybe should start with their studio
output, and then if you like that, then maybe move onto this? The recording
quality is, you know, pretty good, but since I wasn’t at this show, it’s
certainly not a recording I am going to treasure forever or something like
that. I guess what it represents is a small slice of hope for people that would
like to see a full-on reunion tour, and even see new material coming from the
band.
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