Waxing Nostalgic: Failure, “Wonderful Life”

By Jeffery X Martin

The college rock scene was disintegrating in the mid-Nineties, and the Alternative Nation was annexing everything. Think of it as the Continental Drift of rock and roll. Bands had one leg on underground radio and the other on the set of a blue-tinted video with spinning chairs and dystopian decay, hoping to get some MTV rotation. But the college scene and the MTV kids started moving away from each other, both sides saying, “It’s not me, it’s you.”

Bands putting out brave, quality music fell through that crack, living on only in the hearts and CD collections of the fans they managed to gather. The rest of us got Hootie and the Blowfish shoved down our throats until we either vomited or swallowed that shit whole.

Failure was an L.A. band, generally credited with starting the “space rock” revival that lasted for a couple of years. It was the perfect name for the music, which was based in science fiction and mind expansion. Failure was more than twenty different ways to play “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” These guys took their inspiration from obscure foreign films and futurist fiction, while still taking on horrid topics from reality like drug addiction and mental illness.

Madness was the central theme of their sophomore release, magnified. The bass was always over-driven and distorted, like the engines of a rocket to hell. It sounded like the strings were going to vibrate their way off the fretboard. The guitar parts, especially the solos, were brutally dissonant, notes so sharp you could shave with them. The drums landed like blows to the jaw, tiny explosions where you could feel the shock wave before you heard the impact.

There was a pure chaos in that music, and order was not always brought forth from that maelstrom. It was the perfect backdrop for songs about being sent away to have your head checked, frogs hopping off your brain stem, and viewing humanity as nothing more than ants for the killing. There’s no invitation to join the narrators in their madness, though. Getting into a Failure song is a bit of a fight. The lyrics tend towards the macabre and the music is designed to prevent easy listening. Any Hootie and the Blowfish fan worth his polo shirt would already be playing golf with the bros instead of listening to Failure.

The song, “Wonderful Life,” sums up the ethos of magnified perfectly. Ken Andrews sings about dead kids, crazy people, and loneliness, how the meds don’t work anymore and all he wants to do is get really high and forget how terrible the world is, regardless of the fact that he himself lives in squalor, intensifying that pain, internalizing it, and making it a hyper-reality.

“That restless old monkey/Prisoned inside of me/Stiff bones that hold him in/He waits trapped deep within. . . ”

Music doesn’t have to be happy to be amazing, but it doesn’t have to be generically depressing, either. magnified feels like a true look through drug-colored glasses at a world gone utterly mad and unafraid to take you down with it. It’s a rare band that can pull off a complete vision like that, with no punches pulled and no tacked-on happy ending. As such, Failure came out the true artistic winner from a decade full of bands like nine inch nails and Pearl Jam, initially recognized for their rage-filled songs. Even The Downward Spiral held out a glimmer of hope at the end.

Failure went all the way down the rabbit hole without flinching and without looking back and, if you followed them, you had to find your own way home.

Failure is currently opening for Tool on tour dates through May 2014.

Listen to Failure and other bands from the past that are a golden gas on the Waxing Nostalgic Spotify playlist!