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You always think you know what to expect deep down,
always. Even if there’s no courage in your convictions
the fact that they do exist demonstrates trust in your
own experiences and resolve. Even if you end up cataclysmically
wrong. It’s what keeps you ticking through the constant
adversity that life, by definition, provides. On most
occasions there’s no better person to trust than yourself,
as The Faint would doubtless attest too. At least
you think and hope they would. Evidence suggests they
should.
Then there is the issue that they’ve allegedly jumped
genres like desperate rats between an armada of musical
vessels since their mid-90s Brit-pop inception, but
then last year was ground zero for most people and that
is probably how it should stay. Their sophomore 80s-aping
electronic effort, 2002’s enormously lauded ‘Danse Macabre’,
is a mirror of its title, a dark, untrusting, unrelenting,
paranoid beast, writhing fragmented behind broken glass
and steel barrels, cut, a little bruised, but very much
alive. Mascara remaining, smudged but intact. Light
shed on the scene by coloured strobes. It sounds like
it had to be made, an inevitable product of the society
it documents. And it believes in itself, itself alone,
so much that it believes it can take you too. It’s a
record that moulds to the beat of your pulse and works
its deviant worm-like virus.
We, then, were expecting darkness, grottiness, to surrender
control of our heartbeat and some dancing. Of course
dancing, but dancing that limbers a fine wobbly line
toward rioting. It’s those exact expectations that brought
us here tonight. And to some extent we found those things.
But largely we didn’t. Our preconceptions were swiftly
shattered by guillotine, digitised, blown up and projected
onto a giant screen in staggering illuminating pupil-dilating
migraine-inducing neon-headfuck inverting technicolor.
It’s like the attitude is fuck it, they can’t touch
us while we’re in here, so let’s have it. With tassels
on. It’s like our expectations, our belongings, were
snatched at the door.
But the disappointment is countered by what they give
you in return for FREE. The gargantuan day-glo pop-art
projections of planes, tanks, prescription pills, violence,
psychotic poses et cetera – cut in perfect time with
the furious pulsating sound-mass, conducting your involvement
in the whole 3D experience – are a reminder of what
remains out there behind the cheapish Student’s Union
bar and tasteless yellow walls. It’s both worlds and
it’s better. The dancing from the stage often hauls
in the direction of hulaing on hot coals, picking forbidden
fruit from the highest branches, and it looks and feels
liberating. Here they really do look and feel like renegades
of some new art riot.
Which is where near and under-quoted cousins-in-sound
before them Lo Fidelity Allstars (see ‘Let The Poison
Spill From Your Throat’ and ‘Your Retro Career Melted’s
building falling-down house especially) went wrong,
or rather didn’t go as right. They looked like they
lived in the gutter and tried to hitch a ride out on
big-beat and lad culture. The Faint just feed down there.
They exist somewhere far more fabulous. And in the flesh
those crossover you’ve heard claims start to make some
sense. It’s the indie Rammstein! Depeche Mode in better
clothes!
‘Agenda Suicide’, out again after it’s limited Fierce
Panda release last year, is obviously as evil, immense
and electrocuting a system surge as expected, the guitars
taking the wind out of you like they just couldn’t on
record. ‘Ballad of a Paralysed Citizen’, despite the
chattering fashionistas obviously unable to grasp a
beautifully dragging heartfelt monologue, is amazing.
‘Posed to Death’ is Adam Antastic and they’re all wrapped
up in the shiny stuff and given to you like it’s your
birthday. Trust yourself, just be prepared to be wrong,
and to bask in your wrongness. There are better places
out there that you don’t know about yet.
Relevant sites:
http://www.thefaint.com
James Berry for Crud Magazine© 2003
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