The one song Butch Vig said was “from another galaxy”
Not every legendary band is meant to reach the top of the charts. If you look back at the biggest names in music from yesteryear, there are just as many people known for sinking without a trace as there are those who won over the mainstream crowds. Butch Vig may have been involved with some of the biggest acts of the 1990s, but he admitted that he was listening to something otherworldly when he heard Failure’s Fantastic Planet for the first time.
By the time Vig became famous as a producer, though, the entire vocabulary of rock and roll had started to change. Nirvana had come to stomp out pretty much every band in existence from Los Angeles, and everyone was now putting on flannels and trying to sound as depressed as possible in the hopes that they would get on MTV.
Even by producer standards, Vig was pumping out hits throughout the decade outside of Nirvana, going on to work with Billy Corgan to create Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and eventually turning the knobs and serving as the drummer in the band Garbage. It would take a lot to impress him, but Failure found a way by not sounding like they were from this planet.
Their sound may have been indebted to the fuzzy vibe of alternative rock, but there was always a slightly hypnotic feel to every one of their sludgy riffs. Once Ken Andrews opened his mouth to sing, there was a lot more melody than someone would expect with such a heavy foundation, having the disaffected warble of Kurt Cobain while sounding insanely pretty in spots like Thom Yorke.
The band may have never been noticed on the charts, but Fantastic Planet was the closest they came to the mainstream. Including a video featuring future Queens of the Stone Age member Trey Van Leeuwen, the song ‘Stuck On You’ remains one of the heaviest love songs of all time, even though it’s most likely about heroin.
Although Vig was known for listening to a lot of music, he admitted that he never heard anything like Failure when Fantastic Planet came out, saying, “[It’s] in my top 25 albums. It sounds classic. There are a lot of records from the 1990s that I don’t ever want to listen to again, but that album I put on all the way through and just love it…The riff on ‘Stuck On You’ feels like an SOS being beamed in from a completely different galaxy”.
Failure may have only survived for a few months after Fantastic Planet before calling it a day, but some of the biggest names in music were still paying attention. As the 2000s were dawning, some of the biggest names in rock would single out the album as one of their favourites, with Paramore covering ‘Stuck On You’ and A Perfect Circle reworking their song ‘The Nurse Who Loved Me’ for their album Thirteenth Step.
It’s also easy to paint a straight line between Failure’s evolution and where Vig would be going. He might have had his time working with other rock favourites like Foo Fighters and Green Day in the 2000s, but hearing him embracing the ambient textures on future Garbage records showed that he was still listening to what they were doing. Failure may get written out of the history books far too often, but when you have songs that hold up this well, who really needs the chart hits?
