Your Body Will Be by Failure

Failure's last EP, In the Future, was a non-essential holdover and boiled down to 5lbs of product in a 10lbs bag, but even it accidentally had two good tracks. Your Body Will Be, the follow-up, offers nothing of the sort. It runs even shorter than In the Future. Nothing here is as much a shot in the dark as "Dark Speed", nothing flows like "Paralytic Flow", and nothing is as shiny and gorgeous as the redone "Pennies". Perhaps it was a sign of things to come when the opener, "No One Left", barged in like a bad Muse single: sterile, overproduced, and with a hook that recalls Fall Out Boy's "Centuries" in the worst possible way. I don't know what the hell happened here. Too short to hate, and too weak to warrant repeated listens, Your Body Will Be is a baffling release.

Failure has been canonized as a "space rock" band at this point, referring to the sci-fi themes of previous albums, but that corner-full-of-paint ignores one of Failure's strongest assets: their uncanny ability to mix industrial grime and pop. Magnified succeeded precisely because of it: bleak lyrics, aggressive bass, pop song structures, hooks to sever an artery on. Your Body Will Be is toothless, but worse yet, it's hookless. "Solar Eyes" comes close, its monochromatic fuzz bass propelling what's ultimately an decent uptempo retread of "Hot Traveler", but even if was a hit, it would not make up for the rest of the EP. And just like "Dark Speed" xeroxing the space bass of mid-2000s Beck, Failure comes uncomfortably close to sideswiping one of their contemporaries with the fingerpicking on "What Makes it Easy", the kissing cousin of Alice in Chains' "Don't Follow". It's even in the same key. How they let this one go to mastering, I don't know.