10 Hard Rock Albums Everyone Forgets About
4. Fantastic Planet - Failure
About midway through the '90s, the entire alternative scene started to really crumble to pieces. In the wake of Kurt Cobain's tragic death in '94, you had people moving on to something a bit more pop friendly like Green Day and Weezer, while the other bands started to get folded into the nu metal genre that was rising with acts like Korn. There was a way for alt rock to thrive though, and Failure practically sent us into the future on Fantastic Planet.
That album cover isn't even a joke most of the time. When you listen to this record on headphones, the finetuned production really makes you feel like you're floating through space half the time. This isn't the era of Angels and Airwaves or anything though. Going through songs like Stuck On You, you can still feel the grit behind the guitars, taking the sounds of those Big Muffs that used to be the soundtrack to Seattle and putting them in a much better context this time around.
For all of the production techniques though, these guys never forgot the importance of the song in the middle of everything, like the Beatles-like touches that they bring to songs like The Nurse Who Loved Me or the melodic interludes building just the right atmosphere to keep the project together. With a good knack for melody and a healthy respect for noise, this feels like the common ground between Nirvana, Radiohead, and Sonic Youth that no one realized they needed.