If K.K. Downing and K.K. Null would get together, they could be the supergroup of the new millennium. — Jon Skuldt
Sitting on the fence between genres sets an outfit up for problems from all sides. No one, from fans, to labels, to writers, knows what to do with you. Sitting decidedly on the firm line between rock and noise, Pittsburgh-via-Chicago-via-Madison’s White represents an enigma well-worth figuring out. Continue reading “White: Jon Skuldt’s Rotating Cast of Noise-Makers”
“Our mission is to put the fear back into hardcore,” says stern Kiss It Goodbye guitarist Keith. Rarely does a band actually scare me, but given these guys’ varied backgrounds — believe me, no one is safe.
“Two of us were in Deadguy, three from Rorscach, one from Die 116, one from No Escape, and one from a German band called Ambush,” Keith says of this four-piece. He added it all up for me, but I couldn’t explain it to someone else even if I wanted to.
“Very, very few things come before any band I’m in,” lead vocalist Tim begins explaining Kiss it Goodbye’s genesis. “But on occasion some things do come before the band, and certain things led to Seattle, and me having to live here. So that basically broke up Deadguy.”
“From there me and Tim decided to stick together,” Keith jumps back in explaining how the above math added up to rounding up drummer Andrew and bassist Tom to solidify and relocate Kiss It Goodbye to Seattle. “The whole thing is based around the fact that Tim was moving to Seattle.”
“Jaws always drop when I tell people that I had some band and they followed me out here,” Tim says laughing.
“Like the stupid pet dogs that we are!” adds Keith.
Kiss It Goodbye run their grooves deep into your skull, whether you’re listening or not. Their songs pay no mind to your ears and bore directly into your brain. Live these four guys act as starving caged animals, prowling around the much explored territory between hardcore and metal (Keith is metal. Tim is decidedly not metal). They painstakingly seek out the heaviest and most piercing aspects of both and weild them with deadly precision. It’s more than enough to scare the shit out of you.
Kiss It Goodbye is currently negotiating a deal with Revelation records, with a tentative time line that puts them in the studio with Billy Anderson (Neurosis, Mr. Bungle, Melvins, etc.) in November, the record out in February, and them on the road in April. But back to the debate at hand…
“What do you think would get a bigger reaction: a Minor Threat cover or a Slayer cover?” Tim queries pondering the roots of today’s hardcore fans. “Isn’t it weird that it’s debatable?”
[SLAP Magazine, 1997]
[photos by Roy Christopher]
John Duncan is a master of minimal sound-scapes and harshly intriguing collages of noise. He’s been creating sound and art projects for nearly twenty years now (since he was 15, he says), and he’s worked with everyone from Chris Keefe to Elliott Sharp. Some of his projects are painfully beautiful in their simplicity while others border on the absurd in their extremism. They often suggest that, if he thought there was something to be learned from it, he wouldn’t have a problem taking your life. Continue reading “John Duncan Will Kill You.”
Portland, Oregon’s own Daniel Menche is an undisputed master of noise. His majestic sculptures are sometimes soothing, sometimes infinitely grating, and always intriguing. He elicits a sense of control unparalleled in this oft out-of-control genre.
Throughout his tours during 94 and 95, he created and controlled said sounds using his usual contact mics and effects, but added a sheet of glass and a mound of iodized salt as sound sources. Crowds stood astounded as Menche poured the salt on the glass then let loose with the mics, grinding them against the salt-covered glass with one hand and twiddling knobs with the other. He built sounds so huge and threatening, you’d think you were standing next to a Boeing 747 preparing for take off, but he’d just as easily leave you awash in crackling near-silence with your heart racing, trying to catch your breath. Continue reading “Daniel Menche: Attack and Decay”
In the mid-to-late 80s, I wasn’t much for Run-DMC or L.L. Hip-hop existed to me mostly through records by Public Enemy, Ice T, and Boogie Down Productions. I liked their stuff because it was about something. Rap thus far had been mostly about itself.
In 1989 when BDP’s Ghetto Music came out, my man Thomas (my main source for what was solid as far as Hip-hop was concerned) said he would tape it for me. What he failed to mention was that he was putting something else on the B-side… That tape changed the way I viewed the entire genre of Hip-hop. The songs on the flip of KRS-One’s usual positive raps were from De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising (Tommy Boy, 1989) . This was the first record that spoke freely about the ills of Hip-hop so far. It was the first anti-rap rap record, if you will. I wasn’t the only one geeked either: Kids who’d never thought twice about rap were all over De La. It was enough to make them denounce everything they’d established with Three Feet… on their next release, De La Soul Is Dead (Tommy Boy, 1991).
But Posdnous a.k.a. Wonder Why (Plug One), Trugoy the Dove a.k.a. Dr. Ama (Plug Two), and P. A. Mase a.k.a. Baby Huey (Plug Three) didn’t stagnate there. They’ve taken themselves and the whole genre with them (four records strong) to new heights with every release. Hip-hop is a genre that constantly rotates and changes. It’s nearly impossible to maintain any sort of popularity without selling your soul every time you come out (anyone remember when Ice Cube happily recorded his first solo joint in New York?). Longevity coupled with integrity in Hip-hop is truly reserved for the absolute cream of the crop.
De La Soul is from the soul.
I thought hard about the prospect of talking to De La Soul. Not only was I nervous and excited, but I felt like I already knew so much about them. De La Soul speaks from the soul. This fact cannot be denied. Their records reveal so much about what’s going on in their personal lives, there’s almost nothing to ask.
“We as people outside of the industry are alway trying to learn more,” Posdnous explains. “And whatever we take in, we try our best to convey it on wax. So beyond trying to find the best beats and the best music, we try to convey the best we can the evolution of the group. And not justtrying to have th emost positive message, because it could be in a negative light or us being upset or us not finding peace and tranquility… We try to balance it correctly because sometimes, regardless of how you feel, the best tracks may be focused on negative things. We try to have a balance of positive and negative on an album because there’s a balance to what a the human being is. All we try to do is just stay true to who we are as people. We can’t just focus on doing what we wanna do and let it be on wax. We separate ourselves as rappers and realize we are just people, and we just try to do the best we can as people. And that just naturally shows in our music. I’m just happy people have stuck behind us.”
Where every aspect is vivid, these niggas no longer talk shit — these niggas live it.
Just two days after I talked to Pos, Biggie Smalls was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Biggie was only twenty-four years old and is the second well-known emcee to be killed by gunfire in six months. Events like this are adored by all forms of media because the drama makes good copy, but in the process it gives rap music a bad name. The whole damn genre needs rehab. Just like the kids debating in the first scene of Spike’s movie Clockers, heads claim you’re not hard if you don’t kill people. Doing the things you talk about on record is considered by many “keeping it real,” but the grammatical first person in a rap song doesn’t necessarily mean the rapper.
“Even on an entertainment level,” Pos says addressing the issue, “back in the day, even when there was beef, it was more lyrically focused. Whereas now it’s on more of a physical level.” Theatrics used to play a huge role in lyrical storytelling, but nowadays one is expected to be that person — theatrics or not. This clash of lyrical-character versus man-on-the-street is like walls closing in. And those walls are already closed for Tupac Shakur and Chris Wallace.
See but don’t do like the Soul, because seeing and doing are actions for monkeys.
“There’s a lot of groups trying to do positive things,” states Pos, “from Cool J to the Fugees trying to organize fund-raisers, Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys doing the Tibetan Freedom Concert every year… There’s a host of others trying to do positive things.” The most important thing out here is creativity. Like KRS-One says, “You can be a pimp, hustler, or player, but make sure on stage you are a dope rhyme sayer.” Hip-hop is still a young culture and genre, so creativity is a must if it is to expand as an art form and even to simply maintain its existence. De La Soul is easily one of the major benchmarks of innovation in the short history of Hip-hop, even though other groups have reached a larger audience by borrowing their style.
“I definitely feel we had some type of influence,” says Pos, “but sometimes I don’t even credit it to an influence, but just a reassurance of what we were already doing. I don’t like to think that a lot of groups were rapping one way and then when they heard us they started focusing on how we do things. There’s a lot of groups out there who had the same ideas, the same views, and the same energy, but we were just lucky enough to get on first so that helped a lot of record companies pay attention to the groups who were out there like that. When we were trying to put out unit together, there were a lot of rapers out before us that assured us that what we’re doing could be done.” Given, De La begs, borrows, and ganks from the old school, but they blend so much of their own lives into the stew that it can’t help but come out innovative.
Is it my De La clothes, or is it because we hate this song?
As irrelevant as it might seem to their true fans, De La’s record sales have dropped off since Three Feet High and Rising‘s surprise hit “Me, Myself, and I,” but that’s just not what De La Soul is about. “Obviously record sales have dropped because to us it’s not about trying to have this one radio hit that’s not really saying nothing at the end of the day — a year from now, or even a month from now and it’s not even remembered,”
Pos says seriously. “We can make those easily. I’m not saying that ‘Me, Myself, and I’ is something that was necessarily forgotten, but we can make those for days. It was just never about making that. A lot fo people do focus on that and at the end of the day for them, it’s about money. A lot of people want to get a lot out of Hip-hop and don’t put anything into it. Forget it. This is a dying art form and I wast to put something back into it.”
[originally published in frontwheeldrive #47]
“Without sounding too patronizing to the music public,” Godflesh mastermind Justin Broadrick says cautiously. “We’re too advanced for your average pop fan. They want something easy…” he pauses. “And we aren’t easy…” That’s a bold statement for anyone, but there’s very little about Godflesh that isn’t bold. In the most general sense, their sound combines the crunch of metal with harsh hip hop beats. There’s nothing here that doesn’t challenge the listener to keep listening or to think about what he’s listening to. Their newest record, Songs of Love and Hate has all these elements in spades. It’s just plain “uneasy listening” and Justin has plenty of philosophy to match.
“With Godflesh, we try to aim at something quite off balance, off kilter, a lot different from anyone else,” he continues. “[With this record] we were aiming at having that form of brutality of Streetcleaner (Earache, 1989). More so than last record. We looked at last record as quite drab and quite clean-cut and not really hard enough for what we want to do now. We aimed for more of the grooves which is where Pure (Earache, 1992) sort of started, but Pure just scratched the surface of that idea.” 1989’s Streetcleaner is still hailed as the seminal Godflesh record, even though their follow-up (after their foray into dance beats with Slavestate [Earache, 1991]), Pure,was more consistent and truly had more attention paid to beats and grooves.
Justin started his music career as the drummer for Napalm Death. He played on their early record Scum. Before forming Fall of Because (Godflesh’s immediate prdecessor), He also served a stint behind the drumset in Head of David. With Fall of Because, Justin moved to guitar and recorded an early version of what would become Godflesh’s Streetcleaner LP (which incidentally is soon to be available on Justin’s own hEAD dIRT label).
Outside the realm of Godflesh, Justin releases a vast array of projects and collaborations with other people. He plays guitar on a regular basis with Kevin Martin’s noise/jazz-core outfit God, and he and Kevin also pair off as Techno Animal and play together in Ice. And as if that wasn’t enough, Justin has a solo project called Final and recently released an installment of the Sub Rosa label’s Subsonic series with guitar compositions by him and Andy Hawkins of Azonic.
Godflesh since its inception has been Justin and Christian “Benny” Green with their drum machine, but others have joined in from record to record. Streetcleaner enlisted the help of Paul Neville (who now heads up Cable Regime). Pure boasts the additional talents of Loop’s Robert Hampson (who now plays in Main). And on Songs of Love and Hate (Earache, 1996), Godflesh has all but replaced their standard drum machine with drummer Brian Mantia (who’s since joined Primus).
“It was really in search of the groove I think,” Justin says of bringing in Mantia on drums. “When we were shaping up what we wanted to do with the material for this album, it became more evident to us that there was a lack of range in the dynamics of the rhythm. With Selfless (Earache/Columbia, 1994), in retrospect, the rhythms weren’t really coming across. We listened to the record a year later and felt like the rhythms just weren’t punishing enough. It was brutal. It was hard, but it just wasn’t funky or groovy enough, and I think we just lost it with just purely relying on the machine. We feel we’ve gone far enough with being completely mechanized. The aim was to get a drummer who plays like a machine, but we wanted a feeling of movement and motion as opposed to a machine where it’s very, very static. We were really searching for a break-beat sort of dynamic which goes further than just normal Hip-hop.”
As strange as it may seem for a band as heavy as Godflesh is, Hip-hop has been an obvious element in their overall sound. The break beats on Pure and the nearly danceable Slavestate were indicative of something much more than the grind of their debut EP and Streetcleaner.
“I listen to Hip-hop more so than any sort of rock music,” Justin says emphatically. “I don’t really find a lot in modern rock music that’s sort of groovy anymore or heavy to the extent that it’s imaginative. I find Hip-hop more the music of the future, whereas rock music is more obsessed with being stuck in the past.” To bring the point home, he adds, “With Godflesh, I feel like we are a part of the future.”
[Pandemonium Magazine, October, 1996]
Certain personalities leave their marks like earthquakes or tornadoes. They come in, revolutionize what’s going on, woo the zeitgeist, and then leave as quickly as they came. Other influential people work more like glaciers. they dig in slowly, nearly unnoticed, until their mark is made.
Robert Hampson is one of the latter. Hampson has enjoyed quite a colorful career, even if deliberately behind the scenes most of the time. Throughout the eighties, Robert did time as one-third of the guitar-bending trio Loop. Pictures and band details were obscured and quite often indecipherable. When Loop called it quits at the end of the decade, Robert served a short stint in Godflesh (while Neil and John went on to form The Hair & Skin Trading Company), with whom Loop was touring at the time.
“I was in Godflesh” for about a year,” Robert explains. “I joined not long after the Loop thing was over. I did a few tours with them and played on a few tracks on the Pure (Earache, 1992) album, and that was about it, really. We [Robert and Loop-mate Scott] had already gotten the genesis of the idea of Main underway, so I just thought with Godflesh commitments I wouldn’t have much time to spend on Main.”
Main’s burgeoning stock of releases since their inception doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. “I’m a complete workaholic when it comes to Main, ” Robert says matter-of-factly, and it’s not hard to believe. Their newest double CD, Hz (Beggars Banquet, 1996), is a compilation of the six (count ’em, six!) EPs they did throughout 1995.
Though still working in layers of guitar, Main’s overall sound is a major departure from Robert’s experiments with Loop. Where Loop’s guitars were up front and recognizable (even if a wall of noise), Main’s are stretched out and hardly sound like guitars at all. “Eighty to eighty-five percent of it is guitar sounds,” Robert claims, “but they’ve been manipulated and restructured.” Vocals and bass are in the mix as well, but the whole mass of sounds weaves itself into something new and nearly undefinable.
“The way that I structure songs lyrically and stuff is similar (to Loop),” Robert Explains, “but that’s just the way I’ve always written anyway. Really, I can’t say that there’s a lot of Loop in main anymore. I mean apart from the guitars. Main is a lot more free-form. Where Loop was very much about guitar sounds and layers of extreme sounds, with Main, we’ve kind of decommissioned the guitar, taken away all the rock features of it, and tried to utilize a very different approach.”
This approach is what makes Main stand apart from its contemporaries. Rather than just playing riffs or rhythms and building songs, main create huge masses of sound from which to glean their songs. “Generally we pretty much just improvise to a multi-track tape and then we find all the bits that we like — the ones that seem to be going somewhere — and we either take samples form those bits, or restructure the sound and make a new piece out of that. It’s just a process of building and stripping away, really, until we get a layer of sounds that we think we can work with, and then it’s a case of mixing and re-editing and sticking the blocks of sound all together to try and make one thing.”
The ice of Robert Hampson’s glacier-like career shows no signs of melting yet, but when it does, expect there to be a huge dent in the world of guitar.
Slayer fans share a common bond few groups of people share. It’s an unspoken love and fear of what these four guys do, and it manifests itself in the oddest ways. For example, I used to have an over-sized Seasons in the Abyss-era post on my wall. A friend of mine came over and upon sight of this large image of Tom Araya, Jeff Hanneman, Kerry King, and Dave Lombardo, he let out a low growl and threw up the devil sign with both hands. Their recent live home video (Live Intrusion from American Recordings) opens with scenes of a kid carving their logo into his forearm and then lighting it on fire. These are manifestations of exactly the odd dedication that I’m talking about.
This and their lyrical content frightens those out of the loop. Though Satan himself is scarcely mentioned anymore, war, death, and violence still get as much attention as they do on the news every night. There are other metal bands, some just as fast, just as evil, and just as loud, but Slayer holds the monopoly on a vast clique of rabid youngsters who want something more human than White Zombie and more metallic than Metallica. Nevermind all that pop-punk crap that’s clogging their short attention spans nowadays.
“I just can’t stand this pop-punk stuff!” exclaims a frustrated Jeff Hanneman, who’s lead guitar antics could crush Billie Joe’s three chords in seconds flat. “I can’t go out and buy any records that I like. There’s nothing that I want to hear.” Jeff, Tom (vocals/bass), Kerry (guitar), and Paul Bostaph (Dave’s replacement on drums when he left just prior to their last record, Divine Intervention) have just finished a punk covers record called Undisputed Attitude that includes tracks from minor Threat, T.S.O.L., D.I., Verbal Abuse, and The Stooges, to name a few. What could be taken as a reaction to the resurgence of punk has actually been brewing for quite a while.
“We’ve been planning this record for a long time,” Jeff says of the project. “It kinda turned out later to be reactionary, but it was planned a long time ago.” In addition to the cover songs, some songs from Jeff’s short-lived side project are included. “it was the summer of 84 or something like that, and I was bored waiting around for Slayer to kick in again ’cause we had some time off, so me and Rocky from Suicidal Tendencies, and our drummer at that time, Dave Lombardo, decided to put together this little punk band called ‘Pap Smear’. We were gonna put this little record out and play some local shows, but by the time we got goin’ on it, Slayer was kickin’ back in. So, when we were doin’ this record [Undisputed Attitude], someone suggested we put a couple of those songs on there too.”
Selection of the other songs came at random. Kerry and Jeff just threw songs out and tried them. The Stooges song, for instance, wasn’t really a favorite. “None of us really listened to The Stooges. I was really into the Sex Pistols and after they broke up, Sid Vicious used to do that song [“I Wanna Be Your Dog”]. Same with the Dr. Know song. We didn’t listen to them either, but both Kerry and I liked that opening riff and we used to play it in practice, so we just decided to learn the whole thing.”
Barkmarket’s Dave Sardy (with whom Slayer worked on their collaboration with Ice T for the Judgement Day soundtrack) produced Undisputed Attitude. Jeff spoke fondly of Dave’s unconventional studio techniques.
“I don’t know what conventional is,” Sardy told me, “I guess that’s why I do things that are ‘unconventional’.” Sardy has the uncanny ability to make anything sound confrontational, but be sure he didn’t have to do much to Slayer to achieve that.
“We like working with him a lot,” Jeff says of Sardy. “He definitely knows how to bring out the best in us.” A quickie video and some European festivals (including a few opening for the newly reuinited Sex Pistols) are in the works to support the record, but Jeff is anxious to get Slayer’s next batch of hell-borne originals to their rabid fans.
“We’ve got about four new songs done already, and we’re trying to finish the record this year so we can get it out early next year,” he says excitedly, as if ready to show these punks who’s boss. Friend and fellow writer Adem Tepedelen recently wrote something to the effect of “Metal isn’t dead, it’s just wounded and pissed off.” In light of the nineties so-called “punk revolution,” truer words were never written. Just ask your local Slayer fan.
[Originally published in the August/September issue of Ride BMX Magazine]
Legendary science fiction author Harlan Ellison has explored, in many of his stories, the concept of a new pantheon of gods. Gods for the modern world: The God of Smog, the God of Freudian Guilt, the Machine God, etc. According to Harlan, in order for a god to exist, it must have worshippers. “When belief in a god dies, the god dies,” he writes.
Whether you believe that or not, Tori Amos is a certified goddess, a mythological, musical deity with worshippers around the world. She brings them words of wisdom and scriptures of therapy record after record (four so far: 1988’s little-heard, abortive attempt at metal, Y Kan’t Tori Read?, 1992’s breakthrough Little Earthquakes, 1994’s frail Under the Pink, and her fiery recent record Boys for Pele).
With minimal airplay, Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink have both gone double-platinum (a feat Boys for Pele has yet to accomplish, but surely will) and her latest Dew Drop Inn tour continues to sell out city after city. This is all thanks to her throngs of faithful followers, and in the absence of any major radio hits.
“At a certain point, I would’ve done anything to have a hit on the radio,” Tori admits. “And when that didn’t happen, and I hated what I was doing — the reasons I was doing it, I should say — I remember back to a time when I was really, really young and I loved playing. I played because I liked to play, and people seemed to like it when i liked it, because I played better.”
Since Y Kan’t Tori Read?, Amos has held on to this philosophy of doing what she loves despite the outcome. “If you like driving fast, get off the 101 and go into car racing,” she illustrates. “They’ll give you these really fast cars and all you have to do is go really, really fast, and people will come because they like to see really, really fast cars and sometimes they like to see you crash and burn up, too. Once I understood that, I said, ‘Well, hopefully I won’t crash and burn up.'”
No need to worry: On Boys for Pele, Tori is the burner, not the burnee. Though the tales are poignant, they’re just as therapeutic as they are painful.
“I was living this as I wrote it,” she says of the record. “With Under the Pink, I knew I had to make a second record, and I knew a lot of people would say Little Earthquakes was a fluke, and a part of me kind of grabbed at the chance to make more music. I made it in such a way that I talked about things that I knew I could talk about at the time, and yet there were a lot if things that I was hiding from at the time, and that’s one reason I called it Under the Pink. Because I couldn’t talk about certain things that I talked about on Pele.”
These “things” were the crumbling pieces of her seven-year relationship with Eric Rosse (co-producer of Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink). “We were very close. That separtaion was like half of me walked out the door. It wasn’t like this was my boyfriend or my lover — he was all of those things of course — but this was like half of me. When we separated, I had to learn how to walk out the door again and remember the keys. Obviously I found a side of myself that I hadn’t even let come out, maybe my whole life. So that’s what this record became about.
“I had to write this record just to be able to not go running back to him saying, ‘I don’t know how to survive without you,'” she continues. “Because the truth is I do know how to survive without him, and he knows how to survive without me, be he did do things I couldn’t do and I did things he couldn’t do, and therefore the record is a kind of descent. From top to tail, it’s a story of this woman trying to find fragments of herself, but she happens to find her own fire. that’s why I called it Boys for Pele, after the fire goddess.”
Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of destruction and creation, was worshipped with sacrificial boys who were thrown into her volcano. As Tori puts it, The ‘boys’ meaning the men that brought me to a place where I had to find my won fire, whether they meant to or not.”
Tori learned to play the harpsichord specifically for Pele. This, along with the obvious emotional release, and its long running time (over seventy minutes), give the record textures heretofore not present in the Tori Amos canon. She also produced this one herself.
Like her past three records, however, Pele is full of sounds that unfold over time with repeated listens yet still retains an overall thematic cohesion. She credits this to the different instruments she uses from record to record. “When I go back to the instruments,” Tori explains, “I have a better sense of ‘What do I want to create? What kind of music can I play more than once and not get bored?’ My favorite records are always records where every time I listen, there’s something else for me to hear — whether it’s the Zepplin box set, or whether it’s Mozart’s recordings, or whether it’s West Side Story, which I absolutely love. I mean, I can sing that ‘Jets’ thing over and over again…”
Tori Amos (born Myra Ellen Amos — she changed her name at age seventeen) may be completing the transformation into sacrificial fore goddess in the minds of her minions, but years ago she was just a rebellious student at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. She was expelled at age eleven for defying the standards of classical musicianship and continued to hone her unique piano style until Atlantic records took notice in 1986. though she says they’re much better to her now, the personnel there haven’t necessary been the most faithful of the converted. For instance, when it came time to make the video for “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” Tori was counting on director Mike Lipsicombe’s vision, based on his less-than-visionary hand-sketched storyboards, complete with stick-figures, and the executives at Atlantic were wary to say the least.
“I’ll be real honest with you, I’m a lioness,” Tori says of her relationship with her label. “When I say I really want to work with this person, and this is my instinct, they give me a lot of room. Although a lot of times they’re rolling their eyes going, ‘Jesus Christ, can’t somebody give her a lobotomy?!'”
Oh ye of little faith.
[Originally published in the August, 1996 issue of Pandemonium! magazine]
This piece was originally published in the June, 1994 issue of Pandemonium! Magazine, a couple of years before Failure’s landmark space-rock album Fantastic Planet. It was one of my first published magazine pieces.
The name of a band can certainly affect the way they are received by music buyers. It is nearly the only reference point one has (save label affiliation, production credits, or articles such as this one) previous to actually hearing their music. I guess with a name like Failure, the only way to go is up.
Having been together for only about three years, Failure have already left a considerable colorful history behind. Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards (they’ve had three drummers — the most current, Kellii Scott, was in Liquid Jesus at the time) released their first seven-inch single at about the same time as they started doing shows in their hometown of Los Angeles.
Instead of appealing to clubs with a demo tape, they decided to appeal to college radio with a seven inch. This angle of attack earned them substantial airplay and eventually a deal with Slash Records. Their second seven inch hit the airwaves when the ink on their deal with Slash was still wet. Their first record for Slash (1993’s Comfort, recorded with Steve Albini) wasn’t exactly what they had in mind.
“[Recording with Abini] was pretty arduous. It wasn’t very fun,” Ken tells me from his hotel room in Tempe, Arizona. “It was fun outside the studio. He knows about this pretty cool studio in Minnesota, so anytime he has a budget he pretty much goes there. That’s where he did P. J. Harvey and Nirvana… It has a cool house that you live in when you’re recording with an indoor pool, so that was fun…”
As far as the actual recording goes, Ken gave Mr. Albini credit for being able to get a certain sound. But, Ken also said he thought going in that Albini would be a little more open to what the band had to say about that sound.
That “sound” ended up restricting Failure more than helping them, and Comfort was a near disaster. Or, as Ken puts it, “unfortunately, we didn’t have enough balls to pull out before we crashed…”
So they produced their newest (Magnified, also on Slash) themselves. They also took a different approach to songwriting this time around.
“For this record, it was me and Greg writing in a home studio,” Ken explains. “We’d just jam on different instruments and program some drum beats, and occasionally there’d be vocal melodies that we’d put on. And there’d be a period where, usually I would go over the tapes and select things out and try to build songs from that… Much more studio-oriented. We didn’t play any of the songs live. We just wrote them in a home studio, which is totally different.”
The result is a brooding blend of heavy riffs, vocal melodies, and pop sensibility. Comparisons to Nirvana are abundant yet invalid. Magnified is a sonic joyride of moving rhythms and emotive vocals that don’t really point to anyone else, except maybe longtime friends, Tool, with a little more melody.
Magnified has grown on me like a very useful extra limb, and I’ve found myself unable to get through the average day without at least one listen. A plethora of styles and tempos make themselves apparent all the way through Magnified leaving the listener again with concrete reference points. “It’s hard to be original when you’re a rock band with guitar, bass, and drums,” Ken says, “but our music does have an emotional style and content all its own.”
Indeed. “Moth,” the lead single (among many such candidates), is easily one of the best songs on college radio at the moment.
Failure are currently touring with Tool and The Flaming Lips but won’t be in the Pacific Northwest until May 28th when they’ll open KISW’s show with Candlebox, Tool, and others, as well as a possible club date on their own while in town. “The new songs are really working out live,” Ken says of the tour so far, “and the crowds have been really good to us.”
So, what’s in a name? Is this moniker some sort of sick twist on Freud’s reverse psychology?
“The name started out as a joke,” Ken deadpans. If Failure continue their current level of quality music, it will remain so.
