The Faint  

Fasciinatiion

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For some music obsessives, Kraftwerk is still considered the last band to have revolutionized the way music sounds. According to this school of thought, Kraftwerk’s pioneering melding of metallic, rigid voices backed by synthetic, heavy dance noise is the furthest we have ever gotten to expressing our technological era through music. The Faint are of this creed, and, in Fasciinatiion, their very first album on the Faint-generated label blank.wav, these dance punkers have robotically reproduced that sound, offering rousing dance riffs, absurd and discomforting lyrics, and a lot of the same, danceable stuff we've heard from them before.

Within thirteen years of existence, The Faint have had time to revitalize a specific sound, and then wallow in it–wonderfully, albeit endlessly. As unavoidably catchy and darkly compelling as The Faint will always be, they also seem to be stuck in a rut. Fasciinatiion finds them pumping out some extremely memorable tunes – such as the first single, "The Geeks Were Right" – and several B-sides that could have become so much more had The Faint been able to sound a little less like… The Faint.

"Machine In The Ghost" begins with the skeleton of a soothingly off-kilter melody – almost a pop romp – that, had they been capable of achieving different heights, climaxes, and choruses than their usual heavy shout-filled grind, could have proved to be an innovative and catchy song. Similarly, "Fulcrum and Lever", which tells the story of a Jackass video gone bad, could potentially conjure surreal landscapes through its lyrics, but falls flat musically. As a result, the tale that is being told in all its visceral absurdity sounds obnoxious and stale. Also, it contains the laughably outrageous line "eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the hospital bed/I started noticing strange phenomena", which leads one to believe that this band is trying too hard to adhere to a specific lyrical as well as musical sound, even at the expense of credibility.

Fear not, music obsessives: The Faint are still producing good music, but they are sometimes painfully constrained by their own inspirations.

-Jacob Carroll