Album Review: The Faint, Fasciinatiion

“A Battle Hymn for Children” closes The Faint’s new album, Fasciinatiion, and the track seems to sum up the album’s difficulties. For it comes with its moments of brilliance, words concisely stated and resonating profundity in the wake they leave – “in the name of peace we make war,” lead singer Todd Fink intones at about a minute and a half into the song, and the statement is followed by a thumping bass line, a rollicking, computer-altered vocal “ah,” and a soft, machine gun-like tapping percussion to finish things off. But by the end of the song, the band has descended to asking the same tired questions about America’s involvement in war: “If it's true that God roots for the USA / is every bomb we drop in God's name?” Definitely not as wonderfully understated as the former lyric, and it’s like they don’t know where to go after it, ending the track rather abruptly, perhaps apocalyptically, which seems foolish here.

This problem with lyrics isn’t limited to “Battle Hymn,” but pops up on almost every track on the album. “Get Seduced” – “It’s not love / That’s sex on the first night”; “The Geeks Were Right” – “When I saw the future / the geeks were right”; “Psycho” – “I can’t listen when I’m breathing fire / I don’t think straight when I get pissed off / It’d be easier to just calm down / ‘cause I’m an asshole when I get called out.” They’re going for insightful, I think, but end up imitating a youth pastor, repeating pseudo-science predictions, or stating the obvious.

And the times they choose to stop talking and let the music breathe seem randomly selected and alien in their placement. For instance, the brief musical interlude in “Mirror Error” following the lyric (one relatively well-stated) “Can he make a thing exist just by focusing on it?” seems too poppy, too celebratory.

But this poppy, celebratory few seconds is strangely enjoyable, dance-worthy, and musically, tonally dense, synths zipping around, weaving a catchy mosaic with Fink’s voice. And in that sense, I guess a purely musical one, ignoring the album’s logic or the statement it’s trying to make, the album works. The white synth-hop of “Fulcrum and Lever,” with its tapping glass bottles and snapping fingers is entirely danceable, while the more directly dance influenced rhythms of “I Treat You Wrong” sounds like something Justice or Daft Punk would make after drinking a cocktail of American pop/rock.

It’s a shame they couldn’t come up with the right words to back it up.

Final Grade: C+