The Faint

Fasciinatiion

[2.5/5]

The Faint were light years ahead of most bands when they traded in their trembling indie-rock guitars for synths on 1999’s Blank-Wave Arcade. The Omaha, Nebraska-based electro-punks continued to set trends on subsequent albums and tours, where elaborate videos, inventive electronic belches and unexpected twists (such as strings) neatly intersected new wave, IDM and goth-rock. But Fasciinatiion-which is more straightforward and less busy than 2004’s Wet From Birth, the Faint’s prior studio album-sounds curiously flat and forgettable. “Fulcrum And Lever” is a ringtone rap for hip-hop robots, while “Get Seduced” (despite a thundering beginning that sounds like The People’s Court theme) sounds like a parody of a Faint song, with dated lyrics about the perils of tabloid living. (That’s not even taking into account the sub-MGMT “Fish In A Womb,” yet another song obsessed with birth.) Fasciinatiion picks up a bit in the middle, with a trio of well-crafted jams: The dance-punk squelch “Psycho,” a Sonic Youth-esque high-stepper called “Mirror Error” and “Forever Growing Centipedes,” a loping disco-stutter. But without the extra bells and whistles-which always saved the weakest Faint songs in the past-most of Fasciinatiion is largely disposable. (BLANK.WAV) Annie Zaleski

ROCKS LIKE:

Death From Above 1979’s You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine

Bright Eyes’ Digital Ash In A Digital Urn

MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular

IN-STORE SESSION WITH VOCALIST TODD FINK (NÉE BAECHLE)

I almost hear more of a hip-hop influence on some of the songs.

[Laughs.] There’s one song [“Fulcrum And Lever”] that I think of as basically a rap song. I don’t know if it is a rap song or not. I don’t even know what it was influenced by; I don’t think we ever even really brought up any artists or anything in thinking about it or making it. I just thought, “Well, I’ll write a rap song,” just because, why not? I don’t expect that it’ll be a Faint song, but who knows? And then there was one day at practice where the band were playing something sort of like what ended up on [Fasciination] as the music, this hard-pimp beat. [Laughs.] I was like, “Oh, wait, keep doing that! I think I got something for this!” It’s fun to make something that you wouldn’t think that you’d make. It’s art, it’s not just pop music. It ends up as pop music, but you have to have the attitude of “There are no rules.”

It seems like even though there are electronic elements, Fasciination is more straightforward.

Every time I try to say something about the record, I think of reasons not to. I was going to say that it doesn’t have as many layers of things, or we intentionally didn’t add a bunch of extra stuff-or this was kind of the chance where we were in control of every single thing that was happening… On the last record, Mike Mogis made some suggestions. He’s in Bright Eyes, and he is the recording engineer-we’ve worked with him and his brother on all our records before this one. And he contributed some nice stuff to Wet From Birth. His tastes are a little busier than ours, but we liked what he had there, and it was fine. But at the end of the album, after looking back on it, we thought, “It’ll be fun to give it a try for ourselves, just the band arguing and nobody else.”

In that same vein, you decided to form your own label to release this. What prompted that decision?

Just the way the world is, mostly. We’ve always attempted to do as much with the band as we could. We just got a manager this year. Before that it was all Joel [Petersen, bassist]. He wasn’t the manager; he calls himself the responsible one. Obviously, it became more work as time went along. Now seemed like a good time do the record. We have an idea of about how many people are listening to our music, and felt like, “Maybe it’ll be bigger, maybe it’ll be smaller. But whatever happens, it makes more sense financially for us to put it out.” And if we have somebody to take care of organizing it to happen, one person that everybody can call, then we’re off to a pretty good start. [AZ]