Failure ‘In The Future’ EP Review: space rock trio release 1st of four EP’s (to be compiled for full-length album).

For any Failure fans worried that the band’s highly anticipated reunion would be short-lived, you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Four years after their critically acclaimed comeback album The Heart is a Monster, the group are back with In The Future, the first of four EP’s due in 2018, which will culminate in a full-length album due this fall.

In the band’s press release, band-member Greg Edwards writes Living inside a screen seems like absolute freedom sometimes, but It’s more like a kind of psychic decapitation…Everything is talking to everything else but there’s no communication anymore. Only divisions and their promotion. The surrogate reality of the internet sucks us out of our own bodies and puts us in a space where we can imagine we have less and less resemblance to the creatures we actually are. The forthcoming three eps and full-length album, explore the ambivalence inspired by this dislocation.

This sense of dislocation and confusion is laid out over the four tracks, which also ably represent all the band’s most distinctive elements, distilled at their most elemental (with stellar production by frontman Ken Andrews).

Dark Speed, the first track ambles with a Beck-ish, laid-back swagger, with Andrews keeping his voice to a sultry murmur over bubbling distorted guitar and a krautrock beat, with lyrics that bleed ambivalence:

But you’re free now
You don’t need this
You won’t freak out
You can’t feel this

Paralytic Flow is a visceral, textural workout as only the band deliver, blending dissonance and harmony to fine effect.

Pennies is a haunting ballad that hits that melancholic sweet spot of past classics like Mulholland Drive and Another Space Song, full of dreamy atmosphere and psychedelic flourishes, while EP closer Segue 10, has a sinister, cinematic quality that is both soothing and disquieting all at once.

In The Future is lean and mean, a short but sweet salvo that leaves one excited about the group’s further activity this year, all of which should provide the perfect soundtrack for these unsettling times.

But it on Amazon: