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Cars, McCartney, and Bowie, remade by Replicants: When Failure formed the greatest cover band ever


 
I’ve been fairly unrestrained in expressing my abiding fandom of the commercially underachieving ‘90s rock band Failure, both in real life and on Dangerous Minds. They had everything I loved—dense and creamy distorted guitar tones, gripping tension-and-release dynamics, emotive, anxious melodic and lyrical content that FAR surpassed the one-dimensional angst typical of the period’s radio rock. The poor sales of their masterpiece Fantastic Planet contributed to the band’s end, though time has rehabilitated the album and it’s now considered an influential classic, which set the stage for Failure’s reunion last year. The announcement of that tour made me as giddy as a kid on Christmas morning, and I drove three hours to once again catch a band I utterly adored but hadn’t seen in concert since 1992.

As it happens, there was more than just a tour in the offing—Failure have fully reactivated, and their first album in 19 years, The Heart Is A Monster, will arrive next week. I’m confident that fans of Fantastic Planet will be more than satisfied—I typically take a dim view of reunions, and if Monster was in any way unsatisfactory, I’d be properly bitching up a storm about it. But no. It’s goddamn glorious. The band conceived Monster as a continuation of Planet, and even picked up the numbering of its interstitial segues from where the prior album left off. I’ll not subject you to lengthy gushing, it’s streaming in its entirety on Entertainment Weekly’s web site if you want to judge for yourself. I recommend listening from beginning to end in a sitting if you can swing the time. (I should add that they’re on tour now, and later in the summer they’re doing dates with another neglected ‘90s favorite of mine, Hum, about which I’m kinda headsploding.)
 

 
One of Failure’s most illuminating, and just flat out most fun albums wasn’t even a Failure album, but a 1995 time-killer project. Waiting for Fantastic Planet to be released and unable to tour, Failure prime movers Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards teamed up with ex-Tool bassist Paul D’Amour and keyboardist Chris Pitman (Tool, Blinker the Star, and I shit you not Guns N’ Roses) to record a superb album of transformative ‘70s and ‘80s cover songs under the name Replicants, a winking Blade Runner reference. What could have just been a goof turned out as an extremely strong work in its own right, and their eponymous album is not just my favorite covers album, it’s been one of my favorite albums period for 20 years.

A contemporary article in the UCLA Daily Bruin of all places provided a look at the band’s formation and intent:

Ken Andrews, lead singer of the Replicants, has been stuck in a “Warehousy loft-type space” for about a year. Tired of the white-walled complex and its “big air conditioning ducts,” he wants to be out and on the road. But the tortured musician must continue mixing and producing in his “utilitarian” studio.

“I’m really sick of it. I really want to play live now,” complains Andrews. However, the current band member of Failure and frontman for his side project the Replicants manages to remain laid back and positive. And with good reason. The Replicants have just released a self-titled album of covers of tunes ranging from the Beatles to the Cars. Snatching countless enthusiastic reviews, the project includes the talents of one Tool member (Paul D’Amour), one Eye In Triangle musician (Chris Pitman), and one other Failure member (Greg Edwards). And, once Andrews’ soon-to-be-released Failure album hits stores, he will be able to return to his beloved stage.

 

 

Strangely, a four-track demo tape of the haphazard group landed on a desk at Zoo Entertainment. Before they knew it, the Replicants were an official band with an offer to record an entire album of cover songs. “At that point, we had no idea what to do,” explains a baffled Andrews. “Everyone would just bring up songs and either we would all agree or we wouldn’t and I think everyone sort of got their one song that maybe other people didn’t want.” However, they could all agree on one thing: The Replicants would have their own musical freedom.

“We like doing the Replicants because we could do different versions of these songs in ways that Failure or Tool wouldn’t,” Andrews says. For instance, neither spawning ground for the creative forces of the Replicants would think to record Missing Persons’ “Destination Unknown” with an industrial/techno spin. Each song was dealt with individually, following no preconceived notion of the album’s overall sound. This system provided a good musical balance for Andrews and his associates.

Some of the transformations are huge (John Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?”), some are closer to mere production-values updates (obligatory cover-band “Cinnamon Girl”), but pretty much every revamped tune on the CD has some kind of a tonal shift to the darker. One simple and actually sorta brilliant minor-key modulation imparts a wholly unexpected sense of dread to Replicants’ version of the Cars’ bouncy “Just What I Needed.” See if you ever unhear it.
 

 
More Replicants, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.26.2015
09:25 am
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Failure should have been really, really famous, and they’ve reunited for an extensive tour
05.08.2014
12:34 pm
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If I was in charge of the world, Failure would have been HUGE. The Los Angeles band boasted an adventurous musical and sonic profile that few other bands that flirted with the mid-‘90s mainstream could match. Though they grew tremendously with every album they released, and seemed to be perpetually on big tours with Tool, Failure only ever managed one minor radio hit, and then they were done.

My first exposure to the band was when their debut 7” “Pro-Catastrophe” somehow made its way to the midwestern college radio station at which I did a show, and a friend and fellow DJ there began proselytizing the song. Soon after, in 1992, no less a label than Slash—onetime home of The Germs, X, and Violent Femmes—released Failure’s debut album Comfort. The album was a Steve Albini production, and his typical sonic fingerprints intrude WAY too deeply into the band’s sound, but it’s still a really good record. The band ably explores everything from shoegaze textures to thick, noisy riffs to huge, soaring choruses, and the album points clearly to the band’s future.
 

 
It was in that early era that Failure treated me to one of the weirdest concert experiences of my life. They were on their first tour, and whoever booked them in my town really munged things up. Though they had plenty of college radio support in the area, nobody knew they were coming. Rather than get them into one of the small venues where an audience for their kind of thing already existed, someone booked them into FAR too big a room for a nascent indie band, and nobody seemed to have bothered with any publicity. I only found out about the show because a tiny mention of it in the weekly entertainment fish-wrap happened to catch my eye. As it turned out, I was literally the only paid audience member. It gets betterworse. The venue had two theaters, and in the other theater on the same night was that dreadful Laurel Canyon country-rock band Poco. Failure’s opening band prompted noise complaints from that show’s attendees, so Failure weren’t permitted to play until Poco’s last encore was over. Failure ended up playing their first several songs to a variously baffled and scornful crowd of dreary old complacent hippies who were filing past the room on their way out. I have to give them a lot of credit; they played to those people (and me, and their openers) like they had a full house of rabid fans. I think that right there cemented me as a perma-fan every bit as much as the excellence of their subsequent records.
 

 

 
The disappointing inadequacy of their debut’s production prompted the band’s principals, singer/guitarist Ken Andrews and bassist Greg Edwards, to learn production on their own. The move paid off. Their second album, Magnified, was a major leap for the band, sonically. But the third, Fantastic Planet was a bigger leap still, both in sound and conceptual ambition, and it’s the album that inspired the cult following that only grew after the band’s demise. It’s full of bold experiments, great guitar ideas, and fine songs like “Daylight,” “Heliotropic,” “Solaris,” and the luminous single “Stuck on You,” which finally won the band a modest place on MTV and mainstream radio’s rotations.
 

 

 

 

 
Sadly, though, by the time Failure were poised to level up, the corporate music sector’s throw-money-at-everything-that-moves approach to “alternative” had petered out. It wasn’t enough to have a foundation of consistent growth and a modest hit. All of Failure’s eggs were in the basket of “Stuck on You,” and since it was merely a minor hit, that spelled the beginning of the end for the band. Greg Edwards graciously took some time to tell DM all about it in a recent phone conversation.

It was a weird time in the music business. “Stuck on You” as a single did moderately well, but we didn’t have a follow-up that fit the format that radio was looking for. Everybody in the business just loved the cookie-cutter thing, funnel it into radio, make a big splash, and have a video—that was sort of at the end of those days. But if you didn’t follow that path then oftentimes you just sort of faded away. Luckily that didn’t really matter to us because we’d made a record that had a lot of substance to it, but it was still difficult to take, the fact that the profile of our career at that point hinged entirely on whether this ONE SONG really hit on radio.

So label support was pulled from the album, and after recording a covers album with Paul D’Amour of Tool under the name “Replicants” and contributing a cover of “Enjoy the Silence” to a Depeche Mode tribute album, Failure were through. Andrews’ production work on Failure’s albums made him an in-demand producer. Edwards has since played in Lusk and Autolux (who are still active and are really, really awesome, not incidentally). Second guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen has played in Queens of the Stone Age and A Perfect Circle, and has even been honored with a signature model Fender Jazzmaster. But as Fantastic Planet’s reputation only grew over the years—and seriously, I’m sure plenty of us can name a lot of 1996 albums that sold way better but don’t hold up for shit—the reunion bug bit. Per Edwards:

Ken and I didn’t have contact for awhile, then we came back together as two fathers. We both had children right around the same age, so we started hanging out in that context, and it just naturally happened that we eventually found ourselves talking about making more music. The reality is, if we didn’t have this experience of writing and creating new stuff that we were pretty excited about, we wouldn’t be doing the reunion thing. We’re not doing it to do it for a second and then fade away, it’s part of a longer term plan. We’ve worked on some new material that we’re pretty excited about, which gave us the momentum to do this. The thought of doing a reunion with nothing new fueling it is kind of unappealing. I can’t say for sure that there will be a fourth album, but right now there are a handful of songs that definitely seem to sound like the foundation for a fourth Failure record.

It really got into full swing in 2013. At the end of 2012 we were working on stuff, then the idea of a live show came up very innocently. Ken and I were having lunch and it just came up that maybe it would be fun to play a small club or something, and maybe some people would come who would enjoy it. We had no idea that the first show at the El Rey, we had no idea that it would be such a success. We weren’t even thinking we could DO a venue like the El Rey, so it was really gratifying to have that experience. We were aware that there was an intense following that still listened to the records, and that there were some younger people who’d discovered it, but that kind of stuff you can analyze from social media doesn’t necessarily have a direct correlation to what happens when you play a show. So we didn’t have any confidence, then the EL Rey show sold out in five minutes. That really blew us away. After that it seemed like it was worth it to do a reunion headline tour. The feeling we got from the fans at the El Rey show made us fell like maybe we were obligated to play these songs for these people who never got to see them live. We’re more connected as a band when we’re onstage, and so far it’s been a very positive situation with a lot of momentum.

That reunion tour begins this weekend with two sold-out shows in Los Angeles, with Puscifer and A Perfect Circle (those two shows are the 50th birthday celebration for Maynard James Keenan). Here are the dates. Check with venues for ticket availability:

May 10 Los Angeles, CA The Greek Theatre
May 11 Los Angeles, CA The Greek Theatre
May 14 San Francisco, CA Great American Music Hall
May 15 San Francisco, CA Great American Music Hall
May 17 Vancouver, BC Rickshaw Theatre
May 18 Seattle, WA The Showbox
May 21 Minneapolis, MN The Varsity
May 22 Chicago, IL The Metro
May 24 Milwaukee, WI The Rave II
May 25 Detroit, MI St. Andrew’s Hall
May 26 Toronto, ON Mod Club
May 27 Toronto, ON Mod Club
May 29 New York, NY Irving Plaza
May 30 Philadelphia, PA Theatre of Living Arts
May 31 Asbury Park, NJ The Stone Pony
June 1 Boston, MA Paradise Rock Club
June 3 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg
June 5 Silver Spring, MD The Fillmore
June 7 Atlanta, GA Masquerade
June 8 Nashville, TN Exit In
June 10 Dallas, TX House of Blues
June 11 Houston, TX House of Blues
June 13 Phoenix, AZ The Marquee Theatre
June 14 Pomona, CA The Glasshouse
June 15 San Diego, CA House of Blues
June 18 Los Angeles, CA The Mayan
June 19 Los Angeles, CA The Mayan

If you’re on the fence about going, checking out the El Rey show from February might help you decide. Here it is:
 

 
Bonus: here’s a terrific interview with both Edwards and Andrews from radio.com.
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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05.08.2014
12:34 pm
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The ‘Invisible Hand’ of the free market flips ‘Atlas Shrugged’ trilogy the bird


Who gives a shit?

After the unfettered free market showed with extraordinary clarity that nobody gave a shit about the crappy Atlas Shrugged movies, its producers are on Kickstarter to finance the third installment. Per Filmdrunk’s Vince Mancini:

According to Ayn Rand’s most fervant fanboys – Shruggalos, as I like to call them – Atlas Shrugged, her 1139-page anti-collectivist screed about what would happen if society’s movers and shakers decided not to work (shrugged, if you will) remains as relevant today as it was when it was published during the days of Mao and Khrushchev in 1957.

When Shruggalos John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow couldn’t get socialist Hollywood to follow through with making an Atlas Shrugged movie, they produced it themselves, releasing it on tax day in 2011, when it earned $4.6 million on a $20 million budget. A second installment made $3.3 million in 2012, and now the producers are on Kickstarter raising money for a third installment, Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt?, with a video featuring celebrity Shruggalos Dennis Miller, Sean Hannity, John Stossel, Penn Jillette, Glenn Beck, and that one fat guy with no forehead. WHO’S LOOKING FOR HANDOUTS NOW, PAULTARDS?!?

At least, that’s what they want the story to be. They’re basically financing the $10 million movie themselves again, but they’re using the $250,000 Kickstarter campaign as a publicity stunt, since no one paid attention to their crappy movies the last two times. A canny strategy?

OK, first, I’m totally stealing “Shruggalos.” Second, it seems unlikely that this “publicity stunt” (riiiiiiiiiight) is going to get anyone out to see the end of a preposterous oligarchic fantasy trilogy to which nobody saw the first two installments. There’s no getting around it, Atlas shat the bed. These are self-described Objectivists—elite Objectivists, even—begging for money because their business failed - being, what’s that word they love to throw at the disadvantaged? PARASITIC. Just like their maven herself. Financially, however, it appears to be working.

Here’s the only Ayn Rand film adaptation that anyone ever needs to bother with.
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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09.26.2013
08:33 pm
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