Failure
Fantastic Planet
Warner Bros. / Slash
Release Date: 1996
Hot project of the year is the concept album. In a time when anyone who can bang two pots together can weasel their way into a recording studio, concept albums are the one way any musician can get people to take them seriously. Even if you think their concept sucks, the reasoning goes, you gotta give some props to anyone committed enough to work a whole album's worth of material around it.
So Maxwell's got his "monogamy" album, Urban Hang Suite.
The Artist Currently Known as Symbol is hard at work on his next
thematic paean to sex and religion (of course, all his albums are
paeans to sex and religion). Polly Harvey had To Bring You My
Love, her relationship-gone-horribly-awry cycle. And R.E.M.'s
last four productions embrace whatever universally profound theme
Michael Stipe fixated on the last time he got stoned.
Then there's Failure's
latest, Fantastic Planet. It looks like a C.A. -- lots of
little space guys running around on the cover. It reads like a
C.A., with track titles like "Solaris," "Heliotropic," and the
super-pretentious "Segue" 1, 2, and 3. And the repeated riffs and
effects make it sound an awful lot like a C.A.
But what's the concept? Another project by a bunch of boys who
discovered guitars and Star Wars at the same time? Your basic
space-rock formula dissonant guitar wails droning away against a
backdrop of industrial kachink-kachink?
Failure is hardly that simple. A super-ambitious third album from
this California band, Fantastic Planet attempts to boil
together a pantry full of rock styles into a consistent,
distinctive soup. Some ingredients fare better than others.
Like the opener "Saturday Savior." A thick, heavy bassline
anchors this droning march, a meaty hook in an otherwise watery
tune. The same riff turns up in several other songs. Fortunately,
it's good enough to recycle -- and worth listening for.
While the album's first third is mostly leftover Alice in Chains,
it starts to pick up on track five, "Pillowhead." The main
attraction is a poor, defenseless acoustic guitar getting the
shit beat out of it by one of the group's guitarists (Ken Andrews
and Greg Edwards trade off string-related duties). The track weds
Six Finger Satellite's proud tunelessness to the Rollins Band's
urgent fury and the Foo Fighter's driving pop sensibility.
With 17 tracks, there's a lot of interesting music left to go.
"Blank" takes the chords and tempo of Nirvana's "Something in the
Way" and beefs them up. That song displayed Kurt Cobain's
virtuosity of spare emotion, and Failure has no pretensions to
imitate the master. "Blank" lets the weeds run wild, and this
lusher, more scattered approach produces a whole new plant.
Fantastic Planet's last four songs justify all the
imperfections of the album's rocky beginning. "Another Space
Song" is a tuneful hypnotic drone; "Stuck on You," by far my
favorite tune on the album, embraces yummy pop without losing a
single voice-crack of emotion. "Heliotropic" and "Daylight" fuse
together the disparate rock elements present in various forms
throughout the album into rambling, messy yet melodic, spacy pop
jams.
Failure's third album tries to find a new recipe for pop-punk,
and they occasionally end up with too much of one ingredient, not
enough of another. Fortunately, it doesn't take too many bad
batches before the main course turns out to be a distinctive brew
with a taste worth acquiring.
-- Lindy Powell
powell@outersound.com
