Failure's Macaque, moving on, & a farewell to Steve Albini
This is the story of how Failure did their best
A few months ago the Spotify algorithm threw me into a binge of listening to Failure, first their first album Comfort (1992) (& constantly, for reasons that shall be discussed), then the most famous one, Fantastic Planet (1996), then its follow-up, The Heart Is A Monster (2016), then that was it. Which is to say, out of the six studio albums that Failure released in its existence, half of them were enough to satiate my failuriosity. And yet, I feel I should summarize my journey through these three albums very briefly before jumping into the adieu proper. Also, I’ll forego chronological order. Forgive me.
Fantastic Planet (1996) has infestated 4chan’s /mu/core essentials charts since time immemorial, hence I do remember listening to it in the early 2010s, though it bored me for some reason. If I had to guess, I suppose it was because of its shockingly generic mid 90s alternative rock sheen. The first three songs are utter shlock lyrically speaking: the 1st lamenting being emotionally unavailable for anything but booty calling (!!!), the 2nd a critique of polite society (zzz), and the 3rd just whatever. In Fantastic Planet (1996)’s defense, its later two thirds are pretty great! Perhaps give a chance to The Nurse Who Loved Me, a sappy ballad sang from the perspective of a heroin addict with erotomania. Subject matters haven’t been the same since the 90s. After that album, Failure released The Heart Is A Monster (2016), which has a very captivating title1. Something that I liked about Fantastic Planet (1996) on my second listen, and that remains great in The Heart Is A Monster (2016), is Failure’s guitar sound — very ethereal & noisy, like only a band formed by and made for pedalheads would be. If you’re into that sort of thing, give it a listen. Unfortunately, The Heart Is A Monster is not on Spotify, meaning one has to come to it via YouTube and suffer2.
At any rate, what made me give Fantastic Planet a second chance was that the Spotify algorithm threw me a curveball and introduced me to Failure’s Macaque. (Who am I kidding, AI’s true crime is how boringly well it works.) And I loved it. I loved it very, very much. I then went back and listened to the whole album from where that track came from, namely Comfort (1992), and I thought that it sounded great. And I also thought it sounded just like an album produced by Steve Albini. And finally I wondered: These guys had their debut produced by Steve Albini? What is going on??? Thus began the journey.
But why? How did Failure go from being a band produced by Steve Albini to a band that I would both un- and charitably classify as mid 90s generic alternative rock? As it goes, Failure didn’t really enjoy their experience with the production of Comfort (1992), and were ultimately dissatisfied with the sound that I so much adored. In the words of Ken Andrews, guitarist / vocalist and one of the two core members of the band:
…You had a situation where you had a really green band that had done little or no recording, wasn't very good — I mean, had good ideas — we were really trying. We wanted to be original and be different and have a different sound — but we didn't really have the chops to pull it off, and I wasn't a very good singer. Combined with Steve's kind of dogmatic style of recording, it just didn't work out — I don't think it worked out. It's kind of interesting to hear the record, but as a whole, it wasn't really a success. He does so many bands and he has his way of doing things and he doesn't really change them to accommodate any sort of situation or help out any weaknesses in a band. It's like he does what he does and if it works out and syncs up with your sound, then you get a great record.
Then later:
…I guess he thinks of himself more as this audio... documentarian or something, where he's just trying to take a picture of what's there, which is fine, and can work sometimes. It's just, I'm not interested in that — I look at the studio as an instrument and I wouldn't want to work with someone like that again. You get to a point and everyone's standing there looking at each other going, "Why does this suck?" It's usually, I think, the producer's job, or even the engineer's job or whoever's got the most experience in the room to go, "Let's try something different."
The whole interview is great and it gives an interesting (and unusually negative) perspective of how Steve Albini did his work. Steve Albini, the man whose name I know since I was 13, who produced the first album I bought, Nirvana’s In Utero (1993). Steve Albini, whose career with Big Black was lovingly documented in Our Band Could Be Your Life, a book that was literally my life when I was 15, that introduced me to so much of the sound that shaped my identity. And one such sound was Big Black’s Songs About Fucking (1987), outrageously named and outrageously noisy. And that led me to Shellac and to the modern American noise scene.
…And throughout my life, now and again I would fall deeply in love with a band or an artist that would have that one album with Steve Albini listed amidst its personnel. When I had my cringy post-rock phase, there was Steve Albini producing Mogwai’s greatest tracks. There he is producing Jason Molina’s The Magnolia Electric Co. (2003), an album that changed my life in many ways. There he is producing The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s self-titled (1992), there he is producing Neurosis’s A Sun That Never Sets (2001), Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1994), alas, so many albums with which I have been obsessed in so many different and completelyt distinct moments of my life.
Has the through line been Steve Albini all along?
I suppose different people have different criteria for what they like in music, and perhaps something that could loosely be defined as ‘viscerality’ is what has always been my point of approach to art3. Bands that have that approach naturally gravitate towards Steve Albini because this was his thing. As anyone who (as a teenager) obsessed over the life & times of Kurt Cobain knows, Nirvana had to push Steve Albini’s ‘visceral’ take on In Utero (1993) down their record label’s throats. What better promotion for a man who was, and continuously proved to be, incredibly dependable in extracting the rawness that each recording artist had to bring? Jason Molina wrote folk music, or ‘americana’, for lack of a better term. Jawbreaker was a punk band, Neurosis was a metal band — they were different. Their song structures were different, what “works” sonically for them works differently. Viscerality, or rawness, bleeds into these albums in different ways. For Jason Molina, it could appear as a certain metalic tint to the guitar, or heavy strings mixed with such saturation and depth that you think you can hear the wood stretching. For Neurosis, that could be good old guitar sludgefest. For Mogwai, that could be sheer motherfucking noise. He was versatile like that!
Ever since I listened to Failure’s Comfort (1992) and read the abovementioned quotes from Ken Andrews, I have been asking myself: is Steve Albini an one-trick-pony who just so happened to have a particular, albeit extremely good, taste in music, and was gifted in sound engineering for said particular type of music? I hope I have clarified that no, I don’t believe that. I believe that his work spanned a range of sounds and styles that is not unheard of amongst music producers, but is not ordinary either. However, he had his limitations. He would not experimentate with Failure because, quite probably, he didn’t think it was his job to do so.
And Comfort (1992) sounds great, because Failure is, at the end of the day, a great band. Macaque is an extremely exquisite song, with an insanely great guitar riff, and lyrics that wax poetics in such an obscure yet matter-of-fact way about visiting a monkey in a zoo — closing the song with the perplexing chorus “West Africa / West Africa / West Africa” — that it reads more like a zen kōan. It is extremely boorish to try and explain why sound sounds good without proper musical education (& even with), but there are interesting musical choices being made at every step of the way throughout Comfort (1992), Fantastic Planet (1996), and The Heart Is A Monster (2016). Comfort (1992) had an extra help from Steve Albini to bring out some of the edge in the songs, but that’s it. I do happen to like that a lot, but who am I at the end of the day?
To add insult to (my) injury, it is not Comfort (1992) Failure’s most popular album; it is not Comfort (1992) that pops up in /mu/core essentials charts. It is Fantastic Planet (1996), which was produced by… Failure themselves. Failure’s (fantastic) journey of self-discovery and authenticity led them to spend more and more time as sound engineers, which is just actually pretty in character for pedalheads. It led them to develop an infamously weird and long process of music composition, where each song is produced in a single spur, from conceptual discussions to writing the melody to lyrics to recording to mixing, each phase interloping with each other, sometimes in tandem. By using the recording studio itself as an instrument, Failure was then able to fully develop their sound and realize the dream: to sound like a mid 90s generic alternative rock band. With some very good riffs. God bless them.
Meanwhile, Steve Albini passed away this week. I am not mourning or anything, I am just writing a small piece to tell you what I think he did that was great and to reflect on his continuing crossing overs with my life. I appreciated his work a lot, and I miss having Big Black and Shellac on Spotify, though it is in character for a man like that to have his stuff removed from the platform. God bless him as well.
Which, by the way, THE GALL of a band in calling itself Failure. Imagine being the first one who comes up with that. (If someone suggested calling my hypothetical band ‘Failure’, my gut reaction would be to say that it probably already exists & that it sucks.) At the same time, what a powerful gravitationally attractive name. Exactly like The Fall, when you hear that you have to stop and wonder. It’s a gambit, that’s what I’m saying: you got the eyes on you, but you’re forced to live up to that.
Also worthy of note: between FP & THIAM there was a gap of twenty years! Failure disbanded in the mid 90s and rebanded in 2013, releasing THIAM in 2016, which is what first raised my failuriosity towards it. What does a, and I now will repeat the insult, but in a very sympathetic way, what does an ultimately generic (but very good!) alternative rock band from the mid 90s feel that it has to say in 2016? Not much, honestly. But not having much to say is ultimately Failure’s only true fault in my eyes, which is not much to complain about, just a personal peeve of mine & the single reason for my lack of interest in Failure’s extended discography.
This is likely the reason I have to consume prog rock in extremely small sips, and even a full listen to Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (1974) in its entirety with no breaks would likely kill me. In effect, every great Genesis album has that one song that has that one couple of verses that are truly raw: consider the utter despair of the dead boy who reencarnates as a creepy old dude to embrace his lover (who is a child), only to be rejected because Jesus Christ dude, and screams “Why don’t you touch me, touch me, touch me?”. Fucking dire. This is real life, man.