Fantastic Planet reissue June 8th

I'm in this band Ovlov and we were recording with this other band Quilty not long ago. Yeah anyway.. Enough back story...

While we were on our way to the recording studio place, I saw the Autolux CD in their car and assumed they must be fans of Failure, and as it turns out, they actually use Failure as their own personal barometer for other bands.. If a local or unsigned band is into Failure, or is influenced by them in any way at all, they must be worth checking out. My personal Failure story is as follows: I learned about them in the Spring of 1999 after seeing an episode of 120 Minutes that was hosted by Deftones where they played "Stuck On You." Not long afterwards, by coincidence we ended up covering "Stuck On You" in my highschool/college band at the time (a band called Bernie, which was partially named after a Failure song). And now more than 10 years later, almost any song from Fantastic Planet is like a timewarp to my sophomore year of college 1999-2000. Yay for bittersweet nostalgia....

The Failure-barometer has been working nicely over the past decade or so, which makes sense as nearly any band they've associated with is also insanely awesome (search Self, Lusk, God Lives Underwater, Replicants, Local H, Tool, Blinker The Star... a complete list would probably include at least 40 bands).

Two bands come into question, however.. the first being the outstanding Hum, who just played some reunion shows this past weekend. An alarmingly huge percentage of Failure fans seem to also love Hum, and I've been unable to decipher any true connection between these 2 bands other than sharing a shitload of fans.

The other band would be Paramore, who covered "Stuck On You" as a b-side on their "Summer Tic" EP from 2006. This speaks volumes to me in terms of bands who love good music but who are unfortunately confined by corporate strangulation and forced to create more mediocrity to help sell shitty movie soundtracks.

This coming Tuesday will see the long-awaited vinyl release of possibly the most understated and certainly one of the best-produced records of the 90's...