Live Review: Failure Live At Bottom Lounge Chicago

Jul 05, 2022 admin_bitlc Features, Music News, Reviews 0

By Christopher David

Bottom Lounge may seem like an unlikely place to achieve cosmic transcendence, but that’s exactly what happened on Friday night as Failure slid into the breakdown of “Headstand,” the lead single from their 2021 album Wild Type Droid. As powerhouse drummer Kellii Scott led to bandmates Greg Edwards and Ken Andrews into the churning coda and the room resonated with a looping, dissonant guitar figure, a set that had already been a perfect snapshot of sonic ebb and flow somehow reached new heights, and if there had been paint on the walls, it would have melted.

But that’s not unusual for Failure, who consistently deliver quite possibly the best live shows on the planet. Period. I’m not even going to qualify that with something writerly and clever. Failure is, for all intents and purposes, untouchable at this point in their storied history, so much so that the band eschewed the usual opener for a thirty minute segment of the soon-to-be-released documentary about the band’s rise, fall, and rise again in 2014. As numerous musical dignitaries suggest in those clips, what makes Failure so special—and what was on full display for their blistering, ninety minute set on Friday—is their uncompromising approach to what they do.

Opening with the one-two punch of “Submarines” and the seething “Mercury Mouth” from Droid, the trio pulled it back to their first record before exploring deep cuts in their recent catalog, including the thrashy “Force Fed Rainbow” and “Distorted Fields,” surely one of the band’s strongest, punchiest tracks (from 2019’s In the Future Your Body Will Be the Furthest Thing From Your Mind). Wild Type Droid, as has been widely reported during the promotion for the record, was the product of an entirely new approach for the band, who took advantage of the Covid lockdown to produce nearly forty hours of improved jamming, riffing, and all-around experimentation, which was then culled to just a few hours worth of material that eventually became the new songs. You’d never know it; every Failure record is an experience unto itself that also fits seamlessly into the band’s discography; you’d be hard pressed to find a stronger catalog that both maintains its own unique identity while pushing the boundaries of sound and keeping things endlessly interesting. Droid’s softer side—the Andrews’ penned “Bring Back the Sound” and Edwards’ “Half Moon,” one of the most powerful moments on the record—worked just as well live as they do on the album. Fragile melodies can be lost sometimes when so much of live rock performance is about bombast, but that was by no means the case here.

So, what was missing for most of the night?

Anything from Fantastic Planet, the band’s touchstone record.

It was quite the hat trick that had a few attendees scratching their heads, though they needn’t have worried; it was just another example of how Failure does what they want, how they want, and it made for a setlist that felt like even more than the sum of its parts. Following a brief intermission, the band returned to play the back-third of Fantastic Planet in order, from the explosive singalong choruses of “The Nurse Who Loved Me” and “Stuck On You” to the thunderous closing of “Daylight.”

There are millions of successful bands in the world, many of which are talented, and many of which are unique in their own way. There are millions more who will never know success in spite of massive talent, crushed to bits in the machinery of the music industry. There are very few who have a second chance after a brilliant but frustrating first act, only to return and rise to heights that perhaps even the band itself couldn’t have seen coming. Failure are one of those bands. May they continue to keep us all in their orbit for years to come.

For more on Failure, click here

For photos from the show, click here

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Failure – Bottom Lounge, Chicago, July 1st, 2022 (setlist)

Submarines

Mercury Mouth

Macaque

Wonderful Life

Frogs

Atom City Queen

Counterfeit Sky

Distorted Fields