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Since their independently-released debut album Media emerged in 1998, Omaha, Nebraska-based indie-rock synth-pop quintet The Faint spent much of the next decade securing a position alongside the likes of The Rapture as one of the most recognisable names currently operating amongst the veritable sea of punk-funk and synth-pop acts swelling the US musical landscape. In many senses though, it was 2001’s Danse Macabre album that really crossed them over to dance audiences, a process aided considerably by the well-received accompanying remix album that soon followed. This latest fifth album Fasciinatiion (the first to be released by The Faint on their own BLANK.WAV) pretty much continues straight from where its predecessor, 2004’s Wet From Birth left off – and once again, that strange, almost intangible sense of darkness and surreality seems to be lurking behind the deceptively upbeat and dancefloor-based songs.
Witness track titles like Fish In A Womb. Propulsive opening track Get Seduced manages to carry a stray trace of Trans Am in its bleeping analogue synth backing, overdriven bass and clattering drums, but soon hammers down into the sort of disco/punk-funk riffage that would easily have The Rapture running for their Liquid Liquid albums, vocalist Todd Fink’s slightly disembodied-sounding delay adding just the right tense edge to the chaotic, jerky synths. First single The Geeks Were Right follows things up in much the same trajectory, though I personally found the vocoder treatment to be a slightly acquired taste, but it’s with the fractured-sounding Machine In The Ghost that things start to get really interesting, Fink’s vocals veering towards skinny white-boy funk as the electronics flex like some broken 8-bit fusion of Prince and Hot Chip.
The same applies to Fulcrum And Lever’s slide down into tense hip hop, which almost calls to mind Subtle’s indie-electro/hiphop fusions, as Fink’s heavily treated vocal slides between boom-bap beats and glittering synths, before Forever Growing Centipedes returns the rock crunch, as thick basslines and distorted synths lock in beneath Clark Baechle’s fluid cymbals.
Fans of Wet From Birth and Danse Macabre are unlikely to be disappointed with Fasciinatiion, the added bonus being that Australian listeners get three bonus remixes of The Geeks thrown in, by Boys Noize vs DIM, Does It Offend You, Yeah? and Broken Spindles... Nice.
