Album Reviews

There are a lot of interesting things about Fasciinatiion, the Faint's newest release, but none of them are musical. They split from Saddle Creek for this latest album and released it on their own imprint (BLANK.WAV), but tearing out of the Creek's warm, loving embrace might not have been as conducive to "the process" as they had imagined. The tracks aren't terrible, but they aren't nearly as compelling as they might have been in the glory days of Blank Wave Arcade and Danse Macabre. The album watercolor-washes into a mostly pleasant half-hour of down-tempo electronica that occasionally feels like lounge music. And there's nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing all that spectacular about it, either.

Even though the Danse Macabre sound has been rejected, the cover design team was not. The same modified Cyrillic font is used to write "the Faint" on the front of both albums; apparently, something about these albums is supposed to, first, tie them together and, second, make the listener think of the former Soviet states (even though in actual Russian the "A" and the "N" would be a "D" and an "L"). In case there was any room for doubt on this second point, the fellow pictured on the front of Fasciinatiion seems to be wearing some sort of Eastern European regional costume. Unfortunately, none of the drama of the Cold War era tension that careened through Danse Macabre is sonically present here. There is only an image of the past on the recycled-cardboard cover, a pale stamp of what used to be.

This is interesting in its own way, special and unique in the context of the Faint's oeuvre. It is simply not as interesting as one might have hoped.

-Melissa Fall