Catchy Electro Tunes
US electro dance legends The Faint are onto their fifth album; ‘Fasciination’ delivers the kind of post- 80’s electro rock you’d expect if you’ve been following the bands’ previous work.
Opener ‘Get Seduced’ is a hot slice of buzzing synth riffs, robotic vocals, grinding dance beats and anything else The Faint care to throw in to get you on your toes. The lyrics have a doomy outlook on media culture, while the tune does exactly the kind of seducing the band sing about.
‘Fulcrum and Lever’s trippy beats are as mechanical as the name suggests, with almost an industrial rawness to the snapping beats. ‘Psycho’ is one of the easiest tunes to connect too, and probably a likely single with the vocals retrieving a careening human sound that allows for a little indie passion to be injected between the clattering noises. ‘Mirror Error’ does calypso vocals that add a certain tension to the sharp tune, while ‘Fish In A Womb’ is a luscious tune with mellow sounds and curious lyrics about being born that are as modernist and intriguing as the melody itself.
If you have a love affair with binary blips and beeps, then, ‘Machine In The Ghost’ will be your new anthem with squelching sounds and flaring flickers of electro sound. Similarly ‘The Geeks Were Right’ is driven and has relentless guitar jabs but is feels a little too disconnected and generic to attract too much attention. It’s all fine if you’re a robot, but there’s a fine balance between making beat heavy electronic music and losing all human emotion in the process and it seems that The Faint sometimes topple over the edge of this.
‘Fasciination’ is an impressive album as a whole, but it does have some slightly distracted moments. The Faint have a distinctive sound that’s great and they clearly don’t want to change, however this does mean that ‘Fasciination’ isn’t anything you haven’t already heard, but if you like what you've heard, get out there and check it out.