The Faint - 'Fasciination' (Worlds Fair) Released 29/09/08

It is all about crucial timing. There is no doubt about it- Nebraskan synthesiser punks The Faint were peddling their ‘new rave’ wares all the way back in 1995 when Jamie Reynolds of the Klaxons was still the fat kid at school selling wobbly eggs around the back of the sports hall. Back then, they were called Norman Bailer and featured Bright Eye’s Conor Oberst as a touring member. Oberst obviously went on to become a figurehead of acoustic emo (god, I’m having fun with the genres this afternoon- ‘Ambient dream pop’ anyone?) and folk-inflected melodrama.

As for The Faint, they went on to make what can only be described as Zombie nation music, a kind of fractured warehouse rave and guitar hybrid that immediately seemed to suggest reanimated corpses dancing in synch to the chaos, having the absolute time of their undead lives. Maybe I was staying up too late watching George A. Romero classics a bit much at the time but 2001’s ‘Danse Macabre’, in particular ‘Glass Danse’ seemed to be a perfectly fitting soundtrack to such imaginings. Most of all, the creators sounded like they were having fun and you can’t argue as to the infectiousness of that quality in any music.

2004’s ‘Wet from Birth’ was a slightly darker electronic trip, all vocoders, bleeps and oblique references to the apocalypse. As a result, it became easy to see the two records as companion pieces, light and shade, two sides of the same coin, hedonism and vague paranoia inseparable from each other.

Their fifth album ‘Fascination’ lies between such extremes and herein lies the problem. Whilst The Faint still have all of the cosmetic elements of their sound in place and up to scratch, it now seems to lack the urgency that made them stand out in the first place. As a statement of intent, ‘The Geeks Were Right’ promises more than the track delivers and with song titles like ‘Machine in the Ghost’ you begin to think that maybe they should spend as much time on composition as all of this clever wordplay. At its very worst, the nonchalant dehumanised vocals begin to really grate and they seem to have grossly misplaced the melodic silver lining of their previous efforts. At this moment, I’m dreaming of Hot Chip and the Midnight Juggernauts to come along and save the day, injecting the speakers with some immense floor filling tunes but as we all know, in real life the superhero saviours don’t show up.    

Whilst they have undoubtedly earned their place on some kind of ‘New Grave of Wave Rave - The Undead Era’ compilation, this record sounds hollow and doesn’t represent any kind of evolutionary cycle for the band. You know the rules, evolve or die - Write it on the walls of your rehearsal room at the beginning and never, ever forget it.