Album Review: Failure - In The Future, Your Body Will Be The Furthest Thing From Your Mind
The tweet in question then went on to list a handful of pop
culture references that occurred this year including the “Rick and
Morty”-inspired Szechuan Sauce at McDonald’s, and the Netflix original Anime
series “Devilman Crybaby.”
“JFK was assassinated
this year,” the joke continues. “Black Panther came out this year.”
This has been an unbearably long and unforgiving year—but
the good news is…it’s almost over.
When the reunited, pioneering space rock trio Failure began
releasing portions of their yet to be titled and uncompleted fifth full length
in late March 2018, just to put things into perspective on just how long this fucking year has been, my
companion rabbit Annabell was still alive.
I have specific, and sad memories based around trying to
listen to the first segment of the album, released as a four song EP titled In The Future, at the beginning of
April—trying to listen, and trying to write down my thoughts on the four songs
included, as well as the (at the time) difficult to follow release strategy
behind it.
I have these memories, and they all involve my attention
being elsewhere—on something much more important, because during this time,
Annabell had become gravely ill, and would pass away on May 29th.
The second installment of this album, Your Body Will Be, had arrived four days prior to that; the third, The Furthest Thing, coming after a bit
of a delay, in September.
Why is 2018 so fucking long?
The year—marred by tragedy, grief, depression, and a deafening
silence—isn’t over quite yet and I am still writing about the band Failure, who
have now finally completed the circle by releasing the last collection of four
songs—and thus, concluded their fifth album: In the Future, Your Body Will Be The Furthest Thing From Your Mind,
a sprawling set of 13 songs accompanied by three instrumentals.
I have had my misgivings about both some of the previously
issued material from this album—tracks from the first EP being, still, the
least strong when compared to the others—as well as the strategy behind this
process, and the mostly botched execution of it.
Now that In The Future
can be listened to as a whole—as it was more or less intended to be—what
becomes clear is the band didn’t so much save the ‘best’ for last, but they
saved some of their most ambitious and interesting material for the effort’s
final four tracks.
The album’s final act opens with the pensive, acoustic
guitar-led “Another Post Human Dream”—sweeping and grand in its scope, there’s
really nothing else quite like it on the record. It finds the band dropping the
searing, dissonant edge of the electric guitar and the snarling, distorted fuzz
of the bass—and in doing so, not that they really weren’t, but it makes the
band slightly more approachable.
That approachability is also aided by the song’s lyrics.
Failure famously bury a song’s actual intent, or meaning, amid fragmented
imagery and stark metaphors—I mean, Fantastic
Planet, more or less, is an album that uses symbolism of something like
‘space madness’ to veil lyrics about drug abuse and alienation.
In a recent interview regarding the roll out of this album,
and the writing and recording process, the band’s vocalist (and de facto
frontman) Ken Andrews said that In The
Future contains some of the band’s most personal songwriting—adding he was
going through a divorce from his wife of well over a decade, singer Charlotte
Martin.
Knowing that bit of information, it’s maybe too easy to read
a little too much into “Another Post Human Dream”’s lyrics—it opens with
Andrews’ voice barely rising above a hoarse whisper: “I never believed that we could sink this way.” Then, later, as the
song slowly unfolds itself, “Remember all
the blue—It’s been a long time since I missed you.”
The song itself is moderately self-aware, or
self-referential—as much as a band like this can be self-aware and
self-referential. It opens with a warbled oscillating sound that is slightly
reminiscent of the noise that opens
“Another Space Song,” pulled from Fantastic
Planet. The two songs also, of course, share similarities in title—“Another
Space Song” used the heavy metaphor and strong imagery of space travel and
loneliness to describe a longing for someone; here, there is still that
loneliness, and longing, but it arrives steeped in a reflective sadness, and
possibly regret.
It’s a gorgeous song, no matter what it’s actually about—placing itself among the
band’s finest work.
Among the band’s most surprising accomplishments, across
their entire canon thus far, is In The
Future’s closing track—“The Pineal Electorate,” the kind of song that
Failure, as a band, only showed small hints of in the past—specifically on the
dreamy, piano driven “Mulholland Drive,” from The Heart is A Monster. However, it’s the kind of thing that
multi-instrumentalist and the band’s co-songwriter (alongside Ken Andrews) Greg
Edwards has tapped into before occasionally within his work in his other band
Autolux, as well as in his involvement with the one-off Los Angeles psychedelic
pop outfit, Lusk, and their only album Free
Mars.
One of the very rare times when Edwards sings lead, “Pineal
Electorate” is built around his smooth yet spidery voice, and the jaunty,
Beatle-esque piano chords he plunks out, while Andrews (presumably) handles the
fuzzed out bass, which, for the first 90 seconds of the song, give or take, is
panned all the way onto right channel, while the band’s powerhouse drummer,
Kellii Scott, is panned to the left. I would never consider a ‘big rock record’
like In The Future to be a ‘headphone
album,’ but it’s a meticulous and wondrous production detail like this that
almost makes for mandatory listening with a semi-descent pair of headphones, at
least once, just so you can feel the way the song is mixed with the rhythm
section split up like that, while Edwards’ voice and piano remains centered.
Everything then collides at around the two-minute mark,
ushering in a small refrain to the song’s incredibly fragmented, psychedelic
lyrics, as well as a blistering, trademark Failure sounding guitar solo, and a
low undercurrent of strings.
“Pineal” becomes even more kaleidoscopic as it tumbles into
a dissonant, cacophonic, and abrupt conclusion.
*
Eight months after hearing the first four tracks from In The Future, Your Body Will Be The
Furthest Thing From Your Mind—and now having sat with the album as a whole,
it seems to arrive, much like portions of The
Heart is A Monster did, as a band that is grappling with the give and take
of a specific aesthetic, over pop songwriting.
There are moments when one triumphs over the other—take the
opening track, “Dark Speed,” which is probably one of my least favorite of the
bunch, however, it is probably one of the most infectiously
written—specifically when the band arrives at the song’s refrain. The same can
be said for songs like “Paralytic Flow,” “Solar Eyes,” and “Found A Way,” among
others. It’s not that the band strays drastically from its trademark sound—not
at all; however, these songs in particular have a stronger emphasis on huge, memorable
hooks, as opposed to crafting a dense sonic atmosphere.
So while the cutting and ramshackle edge the band achieved
on Magnified and especially on Fantastic Planet are more or less things
of the past, it’s not like Failure has ‘gotten soft’ as they have grown up and
returned as a band. A record like In The
Future is still a ‘rock’ record at its core, but it’s a million times more
intelligent and well made than anything else that falls into this genre.
With the band favoring more pop oriented songwriting, there
are still moments where the atmosphere, or the band’s iconic aesthetic, is the
emphasis—the instrumental “Segue” tracks are clear examples of that, as well as
the revised version of “Pennies”—a dreamy, slow burning song that dates back to
the very, very early days of the
band, and was originally included on the 2004 rarities collection Golden; and the aforementioned “Another
Post Human Dream,” and “The Pineal Electorate” are outstanding illustrations as
well.
There are also times where Failure manages to find that
balance—where a song is catchy, or infectious, yes, but the band also manages
not to forsake any of their sound in order to achieve it—“Distorted Fields,”
pulled after the halfway point of the record, is the first instance where both
the ‘art’ and ‘rock’ in ‘art rock’ collide. It has a memorable refrain, but
sonar blip-esque ripples of guitar feedback also anchor that refrain down; “Apocalypse
Blooms” and “Force Fed Rainbow,” both of which arrive in the album’s final act,
also find the band creating that delicate balance with successful results.
*
Sometimes I am still in a minor state of surprise that I can
say things like, “I am writing a review of the new Failure album” in 2018, give
the fact that 20 years ago, I was a fat, sad teenager, sitting in my bedroom,
getting lost within the soundscape of Fantastic
Planet, only to discover, thanks to the crude dial-up internet we had, that
the band had already broken up by the time I had really gotten into that record.
But now I am thin and beautiful, but still sad, and that
visceral catharsis I found so long ago may not be the band’s current model, but
there are still echoes of it reverberating out through Greg Edward, Kellii
Scott, and Ken Andrews as they perform today, because Failure is a band where a
number of things converge.
It’s where a metal head and someone who thinks OK Computer is the greatest album of all
time may be able to find common ground; and it’s the place where you can both
blast a record like In The Future, Your
Body Will Be The Furthest Thing From Your Mind on your stereo, but you can
also identify and enjoy the attention to detail within from the confines of
headphones.
In The Future, Your Body Will Be The Furthest Thing From Your Mind is out now as a digital download via the band's very questionably managed merchandise store, or their Pledge Music site. The physical release date of the album is yet to be determined.
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