CD Reviews

The Faint

Fasciinatiion | Blank.wav

By DANIEL BROCKMAN | August 12, 2008

1.5 Stars

Four years after their last long-player, the Faint have built their own studio and created their own record label. If this release is to be understood as the end result of that labor, then it was all in the service of finally being able to revel in Carl Stalling–esque squiddly-dee nonsense without feeling compelled to make the tracks amenable to cyborg dance-floor bump ’n’ grind. “The Geeks Were Right” sounds like Franz Ferdinand in the midst of a free show at a tech conference when, unannounced, a soused Bill Gates and Steve Jobs bum-rush the stage and bleat triumphant raspberries through a thousand sleekly designed vocoders. “Fulcrum and Lever” is like a beat-tripping nightmare of bad talk-singing and pointless synth stabs, but its crunk-friendly thump guarantees that someone out there will concoct a sick Faint-versus-Ying-Yang-Twins mash-up. The lyrics are nonsense about grotesque surgeries and a futuristic interface of man and machine; they’re sung with a weariness that suggests that even the singer is fatigued with this kind of thing. There are still inspired moments that make you want to flip your hair back and jump into the fray, like the bouncy “Mirror Error,” with its sing-songy chorus, but for the most part, I close my eyes and it’s as if I were at a party where they’re endlessly playing “Dead or Alive” while some guy next to me mumbles nonsense in my ear and some kid in the corner hits random keys on a Juno.

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