BLANK.WAV
2008
Fasciinatiion
About This Album
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. This love-hate relationship with technology is the cleverest thing about the album -- at least in theory. In practice, Fasciinatiion is almost as much of a mixed bag as Wet from Birth was; songs like "A Battle Hymn for Children" take the album's themes in overwrought directions.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,5,6 and 10)

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