{"id":543243,"date":"2026-04-21T17:57:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T17:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/543243\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T17:57:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T17:57:08","slug":"album-review-failure-location-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/543243\/","title":{"rendered":"Album review: Failure \u2013 Location Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trials, tribulations and one unfortunate implosion be damned, time has made a success of Failure<\/a>. While their trilogy of albums in the \u201990s (most notably 1996\u2019s classic Fantastic Planet) secured their legacy, their lack of record sales ensured they remained on the outer fringes of rock royalty. <\/p>\n

Slowly but surely, however, their cult has been growing. Chino Moreno<\/a>, Hayley Williams<\/a>, Maynard James Keenan<\/a> \u2013 these and more have all worshipped at the altar of their cerebral, atmospheric alt.rock and kept their name alive when the band weren\u2019t around to do it. What has been particularly gratifying to witness of late, then, is the way that Failure (Ken Andrews, Greg Edwards and Kelli Scott) have picked up that baton since 2015\u2019s reunion outing The Heart Is A Monster. Indeed, with the arrival of their superb seventh album Location Lost, they have now released more records than they did in their heyday. And that renaissance continues apace.<\/p>\n

For anyone expecting the triumphant vibes of Disney\/Hulu 2025 documentary Every Time You Lose Your Mind to seep into Location Lost, it hasn\u2019t. Like, at all. Prior to recording, singer\/multi-instrumentalist Ken Andrews suffered a painful injury which necessitated back surgery and a protracted stint of recovery. The anguish of that time colours this record in both sound and word, no more so than on lead single The Air\u2019s On Fire. A song that perfectly summons the ache and disorientation of waking up after an operation, it also delivers one of Failure\u2019s best hooks to date courtesy of the \u2018It\u2019s never felt this way before\u2019 refrain. The mood, often, is dark, but gorgeously so. Even when a \u2018ba ba-ba ba ba-ba\u2019 poppy inflection arrives on the title-track, it is set against a frazzled\u2019n\u2019fuzzed-up musical bedding.<\/p>\n

If this all sounds like so far, so Failure, that is often not the case. While Location Lost doesn\u2019t outright obliterate expectations, it certainly works hard to challenge them in places. That much is clear from opener Crash Test Delayed \u2013 a song that plays out like their DNA is being spliced with Radiohead<\/a>, Nine Inch Nails<\/a> and The Cure<\/a> (in that order). Even more impressive is Someday Soon. The biggest WTF? moment not only on this album, but in their career, its skittering beat starts off in a vein not all too dissimilar from twenty one pilots\u2019 Lane Boy (no, really) before moving on to chart its own course. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trials, tribulations and one unfortunate implosion be damned, time has made a success of Failure. While their trilogy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":543244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-543243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/543244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}