ALBUM REVIEW: Obituary – Dying of Everything


 

I believe Nergal of Behemoth fame had a recent interview lamenting how modern metal acts run the risk of overproducing their albums and not coming across as organic. (Editor’s note: this is not new for him to say.)  And the metal fanbase fought amongst itself online as it usually does, but I think the man may have a point. Lots of Death Metal records have come across my desk recently that aren’t as grimy as they should be. One act without said issue is old reliable Obituary with Dying of Everything (Relapse Records). 

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Ken Andrews of Failure Featured in Gibson TV’s New Series – “Behind The Board”


Gibson TV, the iconic, American-made guitar maker’s first-ever, award-winning, worldwide online network–features original series from the world’s best storytellers. All Gibson TV original shows are streamed for free on-demand via Gibson.com (HERE); subscribe to Gibson TV on YouTube and be notified when new episodes become available at the link.

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Failure Offers Update on Kelli Scott’s Health, Re-Releases “Enjoy The Silence” Cover


Failure’s Ken Andrews has addressed the fans curious about drummer Kelli Scott’s progress in his fight against stage 1 colon cancer. Scott disclosed his diagnosis this spring in 2020 via social media. Andrews reports that Kelli is “recovering well” from a series of surgeries in hopes of curing him of the life-threatening illness. In advance of the bands 4 LP boxed set coming soon, Failure 1992 -1996, the band has re-released their out of print cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy The Silence”, which you can enjoy below. Read his statement below and some social updates from Kelli as well. Get well soon Kelli!Continue reading


Failure Share New Video For Dark Speed Track, New Eps Out Today


Failure recently shared a plan to release a series of new Eps, three to be exact, culminating in a new full-length physical album later in 2018. The first of these Eps is out today, In The Future. You can watch the new video for the track ‘Dark Speed’, directed by Ken Andrews and featuring Blade Runner 2049 and Ant-Man actor David Dastmalchian below.

Ken Andrews commented:

“David Dastmalchian is one of our favorite actors so it was a true pleasure to make the first Failure video without the band in it with him.

Support Failure on Pledgemusic.com and sign up to get all of the new music from the band.

 


Gone Is Gone Drop New Lyric Video -Sentient, Debut Album Early Next Year


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Rock supergroup Gone Is Gone has dropped a new lyric video for their track ‘Sentient’. The song comes off of their début full-length due early next year. Continue reading


Monsterous Effects – Kellii Scott of Failure


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A lot has happened for the members of Los Angeles experimental rockers Failure since resuming their activity two years ago. Aside from performing again to eager fans and releasing their long awaited new album The Heart is A Monster, they have booked their latest tour run with long time member Troy van Leeuwen (now of Queens of the Stone Age) joining them. This is their first time since the band’s inactivity that he has performed with them.

Drummer Kellii Scott shared his thoughts on the matter: “Oh yeah for sure. It’s actually just like it was when the three of us got back together. It was like long lost friends mutual relationship. For me, it literally was like we never parted. It’s pretty cool.

We rehearsed in a place where we hadn’t rehearsed in since the 90s. I think the last time we were there we actually recorded ‘Enjoy The Silence’ (Depeche Mode cover). That was kind of weird because we started rehearsing after we had started playing ‘Enjoy the Silence’ to do on the tour. So that gave us a little extra flashback. It was great.

Obviously there are a lot of songs we’re going to be able to play on this tour because we have an extra person. Troy will be playing guitars and keyboards and some percussion stuff and singing a little bit.

Failure tour poster with Troy Van Leeuwen

Despite adding another member, he insists that simplifying is something that is foreign to the band. Instead they upped the challenge levels for themselves amongst the foursome with a slightly different group of songs to tackle.

I don’t know if it really frees anyone up. I think the difficulty level in performing these songs is about the same. As we’ve chosen to play the songs that we’ve been already been performing out on tour, it probably would have freed everybody up and made things a little bit easier. Being in true Failure fashion, we chose to instead of doing that, choosing more complex songs we couldn’t perform as a three piece.

They were still pretty busy and it definitely requires a lot of focus on everyone’s part. It definitely doesn’t get any easier.

Photo Credit: Sarah L Wilson

Photo Credit: Sarah L Wilson

He also shared what they are working on for the set list with Van Leeuwen.

We’re adding in ‘Enjoy The Silence.’ We’re adding in ‘Moth,’ which we haven’t played since 1993 or 94. We’re adding in three songs from the new record that we definitely needed an extra guitar to perform. There are a couple other little surprises. I don’t want to give away too much.

It looks like an entirely new setlist from what people had seen before. There’s a lot of new stuff off of it that no one had seen us play in the past year. About half the set is new.

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Failure has kept the excitement levels at a high with working in new songs from their latest album, even prior to its release. Fans got a chance to hear select songs from the new album while also working on various songs from past recordings, making each show a different experience than the prior ones.

We’re not really the kind of band…I know a lot of bands when they put out a record they decide on a setlist and they play that every night. They decide on the way the stage is going to look and do that every night. We’re not really that kind of band.

We know if we keep it interesting for ourselves, that’ll trigger into being interesting for the band. Some people have come out to multiple shows. We’re constantly trying to think when we should make the show new each time we go out on a tour,” said Scott, explaining how their inner workings within the band keeps things fresh and exciting.

Photo Credit: Sarah L Wilson (via Facebook)

Photo Credit: Sarah L Wilson (via Facebook)

Being on the road has reignited their creative juices and allowed them to explore new sounds for songs on their new album, just as well as rediscovering tunes from past releases. While much of The Heart Is A Monster is relatively a new release, Failure has yet to perform much of the album and Scott talks about their process of working towards making that a reality.

You know I think in terms of how we perceive the record after the fact having listened to it – each of us recorded it and there isn’t anything on it we wished we had done differently.

A lot of referring to the last question, this album is still so really new for us. Each time we go out we find ourselves learning new songs that we hadn’t played on previous tours. So that keeps it interesting because before [the release of The Heart is a Monster], we would do one song at a time. We would literally have to go back and learn how to play them. So everything is still really new and fresh. We haven’t gotten through every song on the record yet. We’re getting close.

If we count this tour coming up, it’s ten songs off of the new record. So we’ve played most of the record live, but it’s still pretty fresh. We’re all still feeling very excited about it and still very, very proud of all of the things that created the record.

Even on Fantastic Planet there were a couple of little things. We don’t move on to the next song in the recording process until we’re happy with where we are. So in a sense, looking at things in retrospect, we’re not looking at it like ‘oh god I wish we’d done that differently…’ I think we’re proud of and to this point all of the records have stood the test of time.

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He also spoke about rediscovering certain aspects of the band since resuming activity. Being a band as musically experimental as Failure is, Scott explains their creative process and how they make things work internally.

I think while we’re doing it we’re kind of on a creative autopilot. We’re in the zone and it’s all about your relationship working together and a bit of everyone’s intuition colliding. I don’t think it’s unlike what happens when any group of people when they’re working on something in common. Things just kind of transpire without a whole lot of…we’re in a whole another world.

I do know when we do get together it is always really easy. We’re not one of those really labored type of bands. Things tend to come to us pretty effortlessly. As far as the discovery, a lot of that is probably again due to the way we do things, like writing and recording things one by one, and coming up with all of the parts – melodies and things in that fashion. A lot of the discovery comes afterwards when we all have to sit down and learn what we played.

For example, we’re learning ‘Small Crimes’ with Troy, and we started playing that last year and we played that several times until you have a way of playing it live and you add stuff to it. I went back and listened to the original recordings on Magnified and there were several instances and parts where I was like ‘oh wow…I didn’t hear that the first time around.’ I kind of rediscovered it and integrated some of those really small things that I didn’t notice before that being to the performance of the song.

It’s actually not unlike one of those movies you’ve seen a million times. If it’s a really good movie there’s so many layers to it that no matter how many times you watch it, you always discover something new about it.

For me, that signifies that we were successful at what we were trying to achieve. We never get bored at playing stuff. It always seems fresh at playing it live. I think it also why these songs hold up 20 years. We’re playing songs from 20 years ago, and they still sound really cool and really fresh.

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Lastly, Scott talked about Failure’s effect driven sound that has subtly become an influence on many 90s-esque bands popping up in the scene today. Much of that is heard on each of their recordings and he tries to explain where that comes from.

To a degree, it’s kind of like for example you probably have certain set of friends that you communicate with in a certain way, like a certain musical or a language. Then you have another group of friends that you have a certain language with and you put those two groups together, people are shaking their heads sometimes and saying ‘what are they talking about?’. It usually happens with people you grew up with. When they come in contact with people you’re friends with as an adult. It’s like you have this weird language together and people kind of scratch their heads at.

In our case, there’s certainly a musical language that the three of us have together, and Troy, that we don’t have with any of the other stuff we’ve done. I’ve played in so many bands before, but the only band and the only music that makes me play like I do is Ken [Andrews] and Greg [Edwards]. The way I play and respond to their music is completely exclusive to them and vice versa.

So part of it is we already have a built in musical language. When we’re writing a song, we’re responding to each other in a certain way. Then the other thing that comes once we get past the actual concept of writing the song is Ken is just a great engineer. The actual sonic and the meticulousness of the sound that you’re hearing, that comes directly from Ken turning knobs. I want the snares to sound big and this to sound like this. Every now and then again, there’s an influence…’can you make this snare drum sound…’ But for the most part Ken is the one turning the knobs so he definitely has a certain sonic sensibility that he uses as a gigantic paint brush to color over the ideas and songs that we’ve written.

It’s very unique to us. It’s the way we write. The music is very unique to us and the actual sounds that you hear come out of the speakers are unique to us. That’s part of the beauty of the band. We had no interest in being anything other than what we are, which is thankful different than everyone else.

Again the record is so long. If you had the same sounds on every single song, you’d be bored. Not to mention every single song has a different feeling and tension and vibe to it. You could be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t try to create a different sonic mood for every single song. One song might be mad, one song might be happy – those two things don’t sound and feel the same. So they should appear to sound different. Again it makes it easier to listen to a record that’s so long. I have so many records and I’ll get into the eighth song and it’s the same snare sound, the same guitar sound, the singer’s singing the same and it gets a little hard to get through. It sounds too similar over and over and over.

By Rei Nishimoto


Video: Failure Debuts New Video For Hot Traveler, New Album Next Week


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Video still from Failure’s ‘Hot Traveler’ video, directed by Ken Andrews

 

Failure unveiled a new video for the track ‘Hot Traveler’ today. The video can be seen at this link or below:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6HL0BD4MN0&feature=youtu.be

 

The video for ‘Hot Traveler’ was filmed in downtown Los Angeles by Faliure’s Ken Andrews. The track comes off of The Heart Is A Monster (INresidence) due out next week.

 

Failure online

Failure on Facebook

Faillure on Twitter




Constantly Changing: Chris Hornbrook of Senses Fail/Poison The Well


Chris Hornbrook, photo provided by ChrisHornbrook.com

Chris Hornbrook, photo provided by ChrisHornbrook.com

Chris Hornbrook has been one of the most distinctive drummers in music for almost 20 years. Best known for his work with seminal modern metal innovators Poison The Well, in addition to sitting behind the kit for Senses Fail for the last few years, Chris is also known for his work with Big Black Delta and many other live and session gigs. For a guy as accomplished as he is, he comes across as humble and positive; something you can’t say about everyone who has been in the business this time.

 

Having just reunited with Poison The Well to play two shows, this seemed like a good place to begin:

They were really great and I personally had a blast. The headlining gig was obviously our thing, so that was a bit more fun because we had control over how the show went in terms of venue, lighting, monitors, etc. The set list felt really good, as was the people in the audiences enthusiasm and excitement. Skate and Surf was cool and I had a good time, too. A bit of a shorter set and since it wasn’t our show, the less control over all the variables that can make or break a show. Overall, it was really great.

Poison The Well in 2015, photo by Luis Ruiz

Poison The Well in 2015, photo by Luis Ruiz

 

We next asked about the spark that brought PTW back together again and if there would be other shows in the future:

I think it had been in the back of heads for a while. We never stopped playing and recording because we didn’t want to create with one another or hated each other’s guts. PTW stopped because it had become too taxing for some and a few of the band members felt like it was time to take a step back. A break was needed. We’ll have to wait and see what happens in the future with other shows. Nothing is confirmed yet.

Looking back, a lot of today’s bands, especially metalcore bands, owe Poison The Well some props at least as one of the originators of the style. We wondered if Chris, when he hears modern bands, does he feels proud, ripped off, or nonplussed?

I mean I would never say we were the originators of the whole “metalcore” thing. There were a ton of bands that came way before us that had laid the ground work down and produced some really interesting and cool stuff. From my perspective, we just wrote the right record at the right time. I think we could modestly take credit for helping popularizing that sound in the early 2000’s. In terms of today’s metalcore scene, I really have no feeling in either direction. I don’t listen to that genre much anymore and if I do dip into something heavy, it’s more of a “boutique” band and/or sound.

 

Being a band that was innovative and leader in their sub-genre, and then changed radically; sometimes this has the fan base at odds with a band and their creative choices. We asked if Chris agreed or disagreed with this notion:

Thank you and I agree with you. What I’ve come to see and learn is people get very emotionally attached to a record because of where they were in their lives at that point. What that record did to help them out and pull them through whatever time they were having, good or bad. So they REALLY get attached. It’s like they develop a personal and close relationship with that record much like a girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, or wife. Additional to that, people don’t like change, which is something that I find ironic as life is constantly changing. But, we’re creatures of habit and comfort…

So with that being said, when you serve up something that sounds different, you’re normally met with, well, whatever you’re met with. Sometimes good, but more likely than not, critical and bad because it’s not what they envisioned you to do. So PTW just learned not to really care, as being creative, trying new things and pushing into territory that we hadn’t been before became number one. This was advantageous and detrimental all at once.

 

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Senses Fail just wrapped up a spring tour and their new album Pull The Thorns From Your Heart (Pure Noise) drops in about a month. What can fans expect from the record?

An extremely heavy record, very different than the bands past work. Once again, this is going to get very polarized responses. I’m trying to approach it the same way I do with PTW, not really caring because negativity can take its toll on you if you let it in.
Over the arc of a long career that started when he was still in high school, Chris has worked with some of the greats in music production. We asked if he had a favorite producer (production team and if there was anyone he’d like to work with given the chance.

Yes, I’m very lucky to have worked with some of the people that I have. I respect all the dudes that I’ve worked with in different ways and have taken different bits from each person, one not superseding the other. Hopefully, I can check off a few more names before I die. I’d really like to work with Steve Albini, Joe Barresi, Ken Andrews, Rick Rubin, Dave Fridmann just to name a few.

 

Booked for all of 2015 with projects and tours, we asked about his other gigs since he seems to be perpetually working:

Yes! I’m very lucky and stoked to have a full year of work. I’m already starting to hear of plans for next year, which is great. In terms of other projects, I have one with Beau from Saosin, but that’s been put on hold. We’re both really busy at the moment. Hopefully, we can resume sometime towards the end of the year.
Lastly we wanted to know what he does in his down time and what hobbies Chris enjoys

I’m a busy body / work-o-holic. I have to stay busy doing something or I’ll lose my mind. So, with that being said, I generally bounce in between drumming and learning more of that craft, spending time with my girlfriend and friends, and keeping on top of whatever business stuff I have going on. I fill in as much space as I can.
Chris Hornbrook can be seen this summer on the Vans Warped Tour with Senses Fail. You can follow his other projects and book him for lessons via his website.

KEITH CHACHKES


Failure In The Studio – New Record On The Way?


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Failure have officially entered the recording studio to track new material towards their first new full length in 18 years. Frontman Ken Andrews has issued the following:

OK, so if you have not heard, we are officially in the studio making the follow-up LP to Fantastic Planet. To say that we are enjoying the process, would be a huge understatement. For me personally, getting back to record making from the artist’s chair has never felt so right and so satisfying. The band is truly in full creative swing with all pistons firing.

So in recognition of this fact, we are launching something next week that I think a lot of Failure fans are going to be happy about. Stay tuned…
The photo below was taken in our new studio. It shows a few of the new gadgets we are using on the new album. Just wanted to give a quick shout out to Earth Quaker Devices for making some of the best riff inspiring pedals we’ve used to date.

-Ken Andrews

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Failure: Live at The Fonda Theatre, Los Angeles, CA


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It has roughly 16 years since Failure had done a proper tour and seemed like the end of another 90s cult status band falling to the wayside. But fast forward to 2014, if they knew that reuniting would result in a sold out El Rey Theatre show and opening for both of Maynard James Keenan’s Cinquanta shows at the Greek Theatre, they timed it perfectly for a reunion.

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Tonight’s show was ironically frontman/guitarist/bassist Ken Andrews’ birthday with special fog and new songs for the fans who made it out. Tonight was part of their first North American tour in 16 years and the set spanned their catalog throughout their history.

 

The set opened with ‘Another Space Song’, which got the crowd on a roll. The trio of Andrews, multi-instrumentalist Greg Edwards and drummer Kellii Scott were on point from go and did not miss a beat. If you didn’t know they took the past 16 years off, there was nothing that hinted that at all.

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Other tunes like ‘Frogs’, ‘Saturday Saviour’ and ‘Wet Gravity’ gave the crowd an earful in the early portion. The second segue went into ‘Dirty Blue Balloons’, ‘Undone’, and ‘Pillowhead’, while the third segue was “The Nurse Who Loved Me” before they broke into an intermission.

 

The second half consisted of their heavier side of their discography, such as ‘Blank’ and ‘Solaris’, and even ‘Heliotrophic’. A new song called ‘The Focus’ was included in their encore, which they have been playing while on tour.

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Andrews and Edwards traded off instruments throughout the set and looked flawless how they interacted with each other. While they are not the most visually stimulating band on stage, their music strikes a chord with the crowd and they interacted with screams of various song titles throughout the show. And of course, ‘Bernie’ and ‘Solaris’ were the commonly requested ones that did come up in their set list.

 

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Failure proved that they are here to stay and possibly are bigger now than the first time around. Now with rumblings of a new album coming out sometime in 2015, the buzz will continue to grow and this will not be the last time we will be hearing from these guys.

 

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Failure Set List:

First Set:

Another Space Song

Frogs

Wet Gravity

Saturday Saviour

Sergeant Politeness

Segue 2

Dirty Blue Balloons

Undone

Pillowhead

Segue 3

The Nurse Who Loved Me

Second Set:

Blank

Solaris

Small Crimes

Smoking Umbrellas

Stuck on You

Heliotropic

Encore:

The Focus

Bernie

Magnified

Screen Man

Daylight

Failure on Facebook

 

WORDS BY REI NISHIMOTO

PHOTOS BY KALEY NELSON PHOTOGRAPHY