Failure ‘Wild Type Droid’ Review: veteran space rockers express earthly concerns on expansive, bottom-heavy new album.
This feels like a good place and time to abandon the space iconography and theme once and for all. In a lot of ways, this album feels like a return to earth. All minds have been called back to their bodies. There’s a lot to attend to right in front of us.
That’s Failure multi instrumentalist Greg Edwards discussing the band’s new album Wild Type Droid (Dec. 3, Failure Music), and it seems to suggest that even a band as celestial as the space rock trio can’t escape the earthbound madness of the past few years.
Even still, Failure sounds as rich and evocative as ever, expanding their sound with the inclusion of baritone guitar and Fender Bass VI, making a band that was always bottom heavy, sound even more weighty and seismic.
Water With Hands opens the album, with bubbling guitars and throbbing groove, with frontman/multi-instrumentalist/engineer Ken Andrews acknowledging our current disinformation age (If everything’s true then nothing is real/If nothing is true then everything is real), while first single Headstand has cavernous sonics and a hypnotic Police-like melody (with a Brian Eno lyrical reference thrown in for good measure), ending with the band’s trademark use of dissonance.
Submarines is the album’s heaviest track, using their new low-end instrumentation to create a monolithic main riff and thudding rhythms, with lyrics contemplating how the pandemic has affected our collective psyche: My last year was hopeless and down/I was so innocent before the plague, before acknowledging that we can’t live in submarines forever.
Bring Back The Sound is a Pink Floyd-esque psychedelic rumination, while Mercury Mouth sees drummer Kelli Scott hammering down tribal drums over icy soundscapes as the lyrics seem to reference a certain ex-president known for stretching the truth.
Long Division employs a New Wave aesthetic, with church-bell like harmonics, somber tone and dramatic vocals, with Andrews at his bellowing best. It’s the closest thing you could pinpoint as a pop song on a Failure record, but the group’s employment of unusual chord progressions and distressed textures keeps it in their wheelhouse. .
The band save the best for last with Half Moon with Edwards singing lead. It’s a plaintive, stately ballad anchored by pastoral acoustic guitar and one of the band’s most straightforward and emotional melodies, which manages to sound transcendent and uplifting, even with dour lyrics like:
No one wants to hear it
What time you’ve wasted
What trouble you’re always in
Now we’re all just ruins
Open up and let yourself back in
I thought we’d give up tonight
Wild Type Droid may not be as lengthy, bombastic and ornate as the band’s 90s masterwork Fantastic Planet, or their 2015 comeback album The Heart Is A Monster. Nor is it as overtly conceptual as their 2018 3 EP>1LP opus In The Future Your Body Will Be The Furthest Thing From Your Mind.
But it still sounds thrillingly like Failure at their best, offering sonic tweaks and new gradations of light and shade, resulting in one of their most moving collections of songs to date.
