Under the Influence: Failure on The Cure, Big Star, Blonde Redhead and more
Returning from a 17-year break with a cosmic odyssey titled The Heart Is a Monster this month, the reactivated LA space rock trio reveal the albums that make up their DNA.
1. The Cars – The Cars (1978)
Ken Andrews: You can’t really hear the final sound of The Cars in Failure, but they were really important to me. This was the first band I really sunk my teeth into as a fan; I bought their first album when I was 12 and just loved it. When I turned 18, I listened to it over and over and basically learned how to play guitar to that record. It’s easy, except for the solos which are actually really difficult. Elliot Easton’s playing was very session player quality. Ric Ocasek’s touchstone was Buddy Holly, so the underlying chords are quite simple. But they really taught me about pop arrangement and the simplicity of classic rock chord progressions, plus the way you can interchange guitars and synthesizers, playing different hooks within the same song. That made an impact on me. I ended up loving some of their other songs on other records, but this was the one that taught me how to play.
2. The Cure – Pornography (1982)
KA: The Cure were a massive influence on Failure forming in the first place. They were the first group I listed in my ad looking for a bass player and Greg answered because of it. This was a band he and I bonded over a lot; we listened to pretty much their entire body of work up to that point together. Pornography is the record of theirs that made the most impact on me as it relates to Failure. The sounds on that record and the focus it had – extremely dark, never lets up, there are no bright spots here – it’s very intense. The mood was just so strong and evocative. They were kind of my first indie band – the first non-mainstream band I was exposed to that I really loved. They had such an intensity and individualism about them; very inspiring to me when I was writing the first five or six Failure songs, which we kind of based the whole album on. Pornography is a hard pill to swallow at certain times, especially if you’re in a good mood. When I was in my 20s, when I was very disaffected, that was my jam.
3. Miles Davis – Bitches Brew (1970)
Greg Edwards: This is the first album that really changed the way I heard music – I was curious about jazz but didn’t really know anybody that listened to it. So around this time I’m 21 years old – just at the beginning of Failure. I read this list of important jazz records that was in LA Weekly and one of them was Bitches Brew. I went off and bought it, put it on and it really appealed to something in me – these long and lonely notes he was playing, that would just soar above this strange music that was being played with so much feel and precision but also sounded like it was about to fall apart at any moment. The chaos and the structure went deep for me. I must’ve listened to that record every day for a few months – it really seeped in. There’s a lyric in Screen Man from the first Failure record, Comfort, that talks about a guy playing these ‘lonely hidden notes.’ That’s what this is. His playing felt like this esoteric and magical thing.
4. Pixies – Bossanova (1990)
KA: After we did Comfort and started to establish our sound, another band from around the same period that made a big impact on me was The Pixies. It's a toss-up between Doolittle and Bossanova – both equally influential. But I ended up listening to Bossanova more, because I felt that as an album it was so satisfying from start to finish, everything from the artwork to the way Black Francis was able to fuse punk with classic songwriting styles and pop arrangements. It sounded very fresh to me and I just loved it. One thing this did for me was educate me about the studio, and honed my ear. Like, ‘how many guitars are playing right now?’ From the producer and production style on up, every aspect of this record, I explored it all. I still listen to it, too.
5. AC/DC – Highway to Hell (1979)
Kellii Scott: I was given Highway to Hell by my older brother once upon a time and it more or less taught me how to play the drums. I sat with it for months, playing it over, then playing over it. This is the basics of rock drumming. Some years later I made my first record with this band called Liquid Jesus – we were working with Michael Beinhorn, who was just starting to become a big producer then. We were up in the Malibu mountains in this beautiful studio called Indigo Ranch where Neil Young made a lot of his records, so it had this big folklore around it.
I was still only 18 and my inexperience was showing – I’d played live a lot but this was the first I’d recorded. At one point Michael pulled me aside and tried to explain to me some fundamentals about the relationship of drums in music: ‘If you picture the finish line, the first thing that should cross over it is your kick drum – that’s what makes people move.’ I’d never thought of that at all. So the band took the weekend off and he had some of the engineers put a drum set-up in my room then handed me Highway to Hell and said ‘this record will explain that whole relationship.’ AC/DC can be so simple yet so successful because of the way Phil Rudd performed on those records.
6. Sonic Youth – Sister (1987)
GE: The interplay between Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore’s guitars, which were in these strange tunings, and the way Kim Gordon never really played bass in a conventional sense by taking the root note, was just exceptional. She was always playing some kind of a riff or hook while the guitars were creating these beautiful clanging harmonics. Sister just sounded very rock’n’roll to me – it was very raw and innocent. Each element was unpredictable, even though it was also very refined and there was a lot of intellect in the music. It was progressive in the technique they were using and the overall effect, but it also had a truly punk rawness at the heart of it. I never liked a lot of the seminal punk stuff, it just didn’t appeal to me. But the way Sonic Youth used it, I fell in love with. I particularly enjoy the song Schizophrenia on that record – it has this amazing arrangement and the way it breaks down, where the guitars do this incredible bending thing. The lyrics were also a huge influence on me – “Feel it in my bones / schizophrenia’s taking me home” – so dark but so cool and almost funny in a strange way. That was a huge moment for me, discovering Sonic Youth. Beyond that record, it’s continued to be one of my favourites of theirs.
7. Led Zeppelin – In Through the Outdoor (1979)
KS: Led Zeppelin records always seemed to be really simple but there’s this kind of drama they create in the spaces between what they do and don’t play. Like a good movie – there’s always this element of suspense and this slow unfolding of what’s to come that keeps you on the edge of your seat. A lot of their other records – beautiful in a completely opposite way – often seemed very experimental, in the moment and flying by the seat of their pants. In Through the Outdoor seems more like they meant everything as it was written on the page. I always try and bring that sense of purpose – especially working in Failure. It’s a perfect relationship, everyone gives and takes. It’s not even necessarily something we communicate through language – it’s that musical bond you only get, at least in my case, once in a lifetime. I’ve played with a lot of people who I’ve had great musical relationships with, but most of it was spoken. There’s a certain beauty in Failure that I’ve never been able to achieve anywhere else.
8. Big Star – Third (later reissued as Sister Lovers) (1978)
GE: This album, in a way, shares a lot of the chaos I was talking about in Bitches Brew. It’s these beautiful amazing pop songs that Alex Chilton wrote. No matter how weird it gets, even in a song like Big Black Car – to me, that’s as influential a song as you could get. There’s a whole school of music that came out of the slow dirginess of that track. I guess, because of the mental state that the band and Alex were in, and the substances that were being used, it’s just completely chaotic. As you listen, you can’t understand how it even holds together sometimes. It could fall apart but it never does. He was such a great pop song writer – the combination of having these neat pop gems with great, interesting lyrics, presented in that chaotic form. To me, this is perfect. One thing I took from Sister Lovers was that great songs can still come through when their genesis is so subterranean, dark and damaged sounding.
Dissonance and chaos always appealed to me… when an album becomes like a living thing where there’s a certain unpredictability that keeps on giving every time you listen. With Pro Tools now, everything’s on a grid – everything’s hitting on this mathematical timeline. You lose so much of what makes something human and musical. I’m always looking to have some sort of rub. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in terms of things sounding messy or falling apart. It could even just be the contrast between the lyrical content and the mood of the music. I always like to have some kind of contrast.
9. The Police – Zenyatta Mondatta (1980)
KA: Controversial choice, I know; their earliest stuff was a little too raw for me. Not that Zenyatta Mondatta’s slick, but it’s a little deeper in the production and certainly deeper in terms of guitar effects. I would say Andy Summers’ use of guitar effects on that record in particular was a big inspiration, in terms of just wanting to buy effects, use ‘em and experiment. But there was also the aspect of the trio sound, which I learned how to identify with and appreciate. I think that was an inspiration for us; how to arrange parts so we never felt like we were missing something. Having everyone’s role in the band become this important; as soon as somebody drops out, it’s not the band. Right through the whole existence of Failure in the 90s, they were a big influence on me and I’d listen to them all the time.
10. Blonde Redhead – Misery Is a Butterfly (2004)
KS: On Fantastic Planet there’s a track called Another Space Song – where I just play this one hypnotic beat that never changes all the way through. This is a great achievement for me because I’m always naturally pulled towards playing more, accentuating and kicking things up a notch. It’s always a delicate dance on a fine line; I wanted to do more stuff like that. One band that I really love, who I think do that really well are Blonde Redhead, particularly on Misery Is a Butterfly.
I was listening to this particular record quite a bit in preparation for The Heart Is a Monster. Somebody turned me onto it around eight years ago and I was floored by how Simone [Pace, drummer] could just play this one simple hypnotic thing, and you forget that it’s even there. It never changes, so it never pulls you away. It hearkens to the mood that Ken and Greg put out there, which I have such reverence for. The drums can really get in the way of that sometimes, so I wanted to have more stuff on this record where I was more of a background feature that you would almost forget about as you’re taken over by the music.
I love the origin of movements in music, where you’ve never heard anyone before that sounded quite like a certain group – whether it’s Jane’s Addiction, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Radiohead or Blonde Redhead. That’s initially what I found compelling about it, then you get to know that the brothers are twins, classically trained and their voices are just so weird. What a brilliant band.
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