Pink Reason

In the ten years since Siltbreeze released Pink Reason’s Cleaning the Mirror, Kevin Failure’s subsequent releases have been concise, individual statements, together charting an atlas of depression and the struggles with a darkness that threaten to swallow him up every day. Compressed into Failure’s five- and six-minute songs are weeks, months and years of labor and experience, not the least of which are his travels to places where he catalyzed and received underground energies—from Wisconsin and Ohio, through Melbourne and Santiago de Chile, to New York City. Try to map out how these songs are put together, and one finds that the apparent simplicity of Failure’s riffs and chord progressions gives way to an epic complexity. Now that the dust is settling and the commercial concerns of a thousand “lo-fi” projects have vacated the underground for a better life in the dorm rooms of America, the influence of Pink Reason on the past decade is clear.