The Faint - Fasciinatiion Review

The Faint, departing from the Omaha-based Saddle Creek Records, would seem to be in search of a change: for listeners, that change might not mean much. Fasciinatiion is clearly more music in the basic vein they've been trodding forward in since the release of 1999's Blank Wave Arcade.

Their new label, the band's own blank.wav records – a playful nod toward that band-defining album – may have been created for further financial or creative gain, but much to the relief of their fans, The Faint don't seem intent on switching their musical focus....full text After a four-year break that involved building their own recording studio and setting up their own label, Blank.Wav, the Faint return with Fasciinatiion, a set of songs that are as ambitious as they are sleek -- and tweaked: "I might distort myself a bit," Todd Fink sings on "Mirror Error," but that's an understatement. Virtually any sound that can be altered or augmented on the album has been, illustrating the blurring of man and machine that is one of Fasciinatiion's major themes. On "Forever Growing Centipedes," fuzzed-out beats and keyboards zap and twitch like they're attached to electrodes, while "The Geeks Were Right"'s chunky bassline gives the song's dystopian rock an electro-inspired backbone. While Wet from Birth's symphonic flourishes have been pruned, Fasciinatiion is just as ambitious as its predecessor, spinning cautionary tales about science, surveillance, and pop culture sleaze and setting them to kinetic, self-consciously synthetic backdrops....full text The Faint couldn't be more 2002 if they threatened to put their thing down, flip it, and reverse it. The Omaha quintet combined Saddle Creek earnestness and sardonic dance-punk on 2001's Blank-Wave Arcade; by the following year's breakthrough, Danse Macabre, there was a name for what they were doing. But on 2004's Wet From Birth, they were desperately uncool and all-out repeating themselves; it was time for a change. And if you know how fast tides turn in the live-by-the-mp3-blog, die-by-the-mp3-blog age, you'd take four years off to make it, too....full text