I get this error when trying to build my project after changing laptop and updating to Android Studio version 0.8.2.
FAILURE: Build failed with an exc
This happened to me recently when I close one Android Studio project and imported another Eclipse project. It seemed to be some bug in Android Studio where it preserves some gradle settings from previously open project and then get confused in the new project.
The solution was extremely simple: Close the project and shut down Android Studio completely, before re-opening it and then import/open the new project. Everything goes smoothly from then on.