(After “Five, Eight and Ten” led me back to the entirety of Mineral’s monumental debut album, it was staggeringly apparent how not just individual tracks can embody the theme of this blog that celebrates passed-over gems, second chances and significant memories: Sometimes, you get your mind blown by the leveling experience of revisiting the whole gottdamn album. So I’ll be romping through entire records when they demand a little extra attention and time, starting with this one.)

The Power of Failing, Mineral
Released: 28 January 1997

I briefly mentioned this in the 2022 review, but I’ve been reading a lot about how the year was awfully fertile breeding ground for an old-school emo renaissance, the cultural conditions that kick-started the genre’s fifth wave, how nostalgia is a powerful driver of today’s trends and miles of other think-pieces about a subculture that I never thought I’d still feel even peripherally invested in as, like, a bona-fide adult with adult obligations. I have keenly appreciated seeing something that once mattered so all-consumingly much to me reclaim an admirably widespread relevancy out there while I have been casually revisiting that part of my life through its songs asserting their places in this project. And to have one of those songs so effortlessly pull me right back into its world has been a joy amplified by existing at a time when other people seem to be ripe for their own emo revivals, too.

It worried me a little that I’d be tempted to go into too much album-specific detail while gushing about what an incredible, emotionally intense and tangible retrospective it was to rediscover “Five, Eight and Ten” and The Power of Failing and Mineral all at once—not unlike the same kind of low-stakes worry punctuating the early days of this blog, a nagging concern I’d blow my load on albums and songs and artists by virtue of alphabetical happenstance conjuring up old memories that would be better served by later-appearing tracks unfairly upstaged by a quirk of timing.

To be perfectly honest, I think part of that fear came from the fact that the strength of The Power of Failing, for me, was largely contained within its first three tracks, all of which got a little jumbled together as this album slipped away from me and into comparable obscurity. It took exactly one listen for them to get all untangled, though, and getting through that opening trio of “Five, Eight and Ten,” “Gloria” and “Slower” was a visceral enough flashback by itself. There’s a lot of sincerity and confession and raw emotion in those songs that all cover a lot of ground: They all did a more than adequate job of giving me whatever I needed to hold onto, no matter the circumstance that sent me running to this album when I loved it best, and I still can’t quite believe how present and palpable and immediately accessible all of those memories and their associated feelings are after all this time.

From their sound to content, the opening tracks couldn’t be three more different songs; regardless, there’s such a shared existential reckoning at the heart of them and so much of their album-mates that it makes for a unified, cohesive theme running through each track—and it just keeps on going for the record’s duration. Whether it’s questioning your world view, nursing a broken heart or just embracing the world on its own terms from your small place in it, spending time with old loves and new favorites (looking at you especially, “80-37” and “July” and “Parking Lot”) made revisiting and unabashedly replaying this album feel like such a live-in, multidimensional experience.

I do appreciate much more now than I did as an angsty young’n that there are loose but prevailing themes weaving in and out of this album beyond heartache. I think just grasping at the vocabulary to share those myriad journeys of self-evolution with others AND having the courage to tackle such tough, reverberating changes in the first place AND turn it all into a soul-baring, intimate piece of art shows a willingness to be wrong and vulnerable that gives this album not just presence but a persistence to exist. While I still carry the dings and dents of hot-blooded heartbreak and can certainly empathize with if not deeply feel songs of indescribable sadness, that’s not the primary emotion drawing me to music for validation anymore: Songs about bigger things matter more these days, and finding a whole new crop of them in an old favorite that especially College Me loved for vastly different reasons is such a novel feeling that I am so pleased was another unexpected benefit of sticking with this shameless vanity project for this long.

On a harder-to-admit level, I do badly miss feeling on top of the scene and ahead of the trends and keyed into whose new side project is taking off or, like, even just confidently asserting what wave of emo we’re on now. Revisiting this album wasn’t just a retrospective on how impactful it and its 10 tracks were: It was a chance to feel relevant again. Which is a not insignificant reason why I’m delighted to see a familiar if not wildly evolved genre command some more cultural real estate than in previous years.

One of the best parts, though, has been the best part of every second chance this project has given me. I’ve rediscovered more than “just” a song: I’ve gotten to fall in love with an album and a band all over again, too. It’s been such a good time getting reacquainted with Mineral that it translated to “Forlvadell,” a song from their second and final studio album, nabbing far more attention and affection for the excellent timing of popping up in the 12,700 Songs rotation not too long after I was gobsmackingly reintroduced to this band that, admittedly, was little more than a trauma sponge validating me in a way I didn’t know how to ask for or recognize when we first met. Getting to find new reasons to love this band when I’m more than twice as old as I was when I found them is one of those rewards that underscores just how transformative and meaningful a good song can be.