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Of Fracture and Failure

album by Ulcerate

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 4, 2026
Entity authorityQ7078755 ↗
Source-derived summary

Of Fracture and Failure is the debut studio album by New Zealand technical death metal band Ulcerate. The album was released in February 2007 through Neurotic Records in partnership with Willowtip Records, with whom the band would later sign. Written over a two-year period, the album was recorded in April 2006 at Retractile Audio and mastered by Alan Douches at West Side Music, New York City, USA. It is the only album to feature Ben Read (8 Foot Sativa, The Mark of Man) on vocals before bassist Paul Kelland took over vocal duties in 2009.

Jamie Saint Merat has said that the band "set out from the beginning of writing to come up with a sound bordering on chaos and very suffocating in terms of breathing space (or lack thereof). So this resulted in a serious amount of parts per song that all needed to be bridged together to work." In retrospect, he commented that "we were experimenting with some very linear song writing, the songs took a long time to put together, and sometimes when I listen back it feels like some of it is convoluted for the sake of it. We were very intent on creating a mindf**k of a listen, something that steamrolls you first time round."

Lyrically, "the album’s lyrics form a sort of conceptual basis in the sense that they’re loosely chronological, the opening of the album is documenting man’s foibles and ignorance, leading through to tracks such as Failure (self explanatory), The Coming of Genocide (man killing his own kind) and Defaeco, which resolves the album and lyrically documents our end..."

Track listing

Personnel

Personnel adapted from AllMusic.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Of Fracture and Failure” is album by Ulcerate. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Fracture, Failure and album, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2007, 2006, 2009—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2007. For this dossier, Fracture, Failure and album is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “album by Ulcerate” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7078755. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2006 and 2009.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Of Fracture and Failure”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Of Fracture and Failure primary sources, Of Fracture and Failure archive and Fracture research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Of Fracture and Failure” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.