Failure
The Sinclair, Cambridge, MA
25 June 2022
Click below to read all about the show!
It’s Failure and a movie in Boston and across America as the legendary space-rock artists cross the continent in support of their latest record, Wild Type Droid. With the 25-year anniversary of the seminal Fantastic Planet having arrived during the pandemic, it’s their first excursion in wake of the milestone, and the occasion has spawned a documentary film, due in 2023, that focuses on the band’s living legacy. A truncated, 30-minute edit of the doc plays before Failure takes the stage on each night of this tour, and the pared-down version focuses on interviews with actors, comedians, and of course other musicians who found themselves drawn to the band’s singular sound. There’s some unsurprising faces in the doc, including Tommy Lee and Maynard James Keenan, but also a few more left-field appearances such as Jason Schwartzman and Hayley Williams of Paramore, the latter of whom describes receiving a burnt copy of Fantastic Planet from a future bandmate when they were high school students. The film also highlights how, through sheer individuality, the band beat the curse of the comeback record when they reemerged after a fifteen-year hiatus with The Heart Is a Monster, picking up where they left off as if the better part of two decades hadn’t passed in the interim.
After that brief taste of the film, there’s time for one more interlude before the band arrives, and, perhaps surprisingly, it’s a projection of the Ren and Stimpy episode, ‘Space Madness’. The band have always had a sense of humor about their perennial fascination with the cosmic; even on Fantastic Planet they were already titling tracks like ‘Another Space Song’ in self-aware acknowledgment of their obsession. But while the film regaled us with stories of the past, the baker’s dozen songs in the band’s main set centered primarily on Wild Type Droid, including an unlikely seamless segue from Ren and Stimpy into ‘Submarines’. Like nearly all of the band’s discography, you won’t find WTD on Spotify – the band was one of many high-profile expats from the platform in the wake of controversy surrounding the company’s inaction on vaccine misinformation, taking a principled position on an issue that directly affects musicians’ ability to keep touring safely.
While once a four-piece including A Perfect Circle guitarist Troy van Leeuwen, since their reformation in 2014 Failure have perhaps become the platonic embodiment of a power trio. It’s become nigh impossible to envision Failure as anything other than the union of Ken Andrews, Greg Edwards, and Kellii Scott, each a multi-faceted and virtuosic player in their own right. Through their collaboration they have always triangulated the iconic Failure sound across the years, like finding a signal among the stars, as much an act of divination as it is one of creation. Few bands play so deftly with the occasional detuned guitar and vocal as Failure. While many a fan of the band was probably introduced to Fantastic Planet by way of A Perfect Circle’s high-profile cover of ‘The Nurse Who Loved Me’, upon listening to the original you’ll notice little deflections in the chords that Keenan and company smoothed out. While Keenan’s gorgeous delivery would probably score higher with a vocal instructor, alternating the two and highlighting the differences in Andrews’ vocal, as well as the guitar track, slowly reveals the true genius of the original.
The band’s unique dynamic also makes it so hard to pick a favorite album of theirs; while hardly a necessary exercise, it can be fun – and I’d wager Failure fans run one of the widest temporal gamuts when it comes to their favorites. Fantastic Planet looms large in the hearts and eardrums of many, but any of their three post-resurgence albums delights with how they each skirt the border between the band’s evergreen songwriting techniques and modern sonic advancements. Keen to acknowledge the quarter-century of FP before the night concludes, the band returns to the stage after their encore break to play a sequence of tracks therefrom, an absolute hit parade that moves from the iconic ‘Nurse’, through the huge power riffs of ‘Stuck on You’, into the interminable groove of ‘Heliotropic’, and finally concludes in the haunting final refrain of ‘Daylight’. Andrews holds out a finger and traces the outline of the room as the final chord fades into the air, and each of the band members lingers a bit and waves to the eager crowd, visibly humbled by and grateful to each of the folks who’s helped pack the room at The Sinclair for the evening. Be they newcomers or fans of nearly 30 years, whether they arrived with Wild Type Droid or the first notes of Comfort, it’s safe to say that listening to Failure has shifted each attendee’s musical journey for the better.
