#doom abuse

[psychodollyuniverse]

The Faint 

The Faint is an American indie rock band. Formed in Omaha, Nebraska, the band consists of Todd Fink, Graham Ulicny, Dapose and Clark Baechle. The Faint was originally known as Norman Bailer and included Conor Oberst (of Bright Eyes, with whom the Faint toured in 2005). He quit shortly after the band was formed, though the Faint continued to share a spot with Bright Eyes on Saddle Creek Records.

[dysenterry]

[what-else-is-there]

#65. The Faint - Your Stranger (2:47)

It’s an absolute shame that The Faint seems to be fading away into oblivion. After three killer albums in a row (yes, including 2008′s criminally underrated Fasciinatiion), it took them six years to finally bring us Doom Abuse, and most fans of the band that I’ve talked to are completely unaware of its existence. Sadly, the album as a whole was not worth the wait, and I hope the band is able to rally for their next release because historically, The Faint (along with Ladytron and Fischerspooner), have been one of the few bands from the electroclash scene of the 00′s to consistently release quality stuff. Luckily, a spark of their old greatness surfaces on Doom Abuse in a few spots, mainly via “Loss Of Head”, “Mental Radio”, and “Your Stranger”. The latter is a great example of Todd Fink’s uncanny ability to write incredibly clever and relatable bits of self doubt and depreciation (”I don’t want to be your nothing” / ”I think myself to pieces!”) to pair with the band’s signature frantic, yet structured dance punk. The bassline endlessly barrels forward while squeaking synths periodically pierce our brain to really drive home the feeling of being hopelessly infatuated with someone who doesn’t even know we exist.

Best Moment: Every time Todd’s inner monologue chimes in to lend his view on the situation during the chorus, but especially the final one (“Love is a fantasy I’m in”) at 2:16.

The Album [Doom Abuse]: 4/10

Music Video

[thesomethingblog]

Interview: Todd Fink of The Faint

Another interview that lasted a little too long. This is probably my third favorite interview behind Courtney from The Dandy Warhols and Derek from Sleigh Bells. Todd even thanked me for interviewing him at the end, which not many others have done.

Lisa Mrock: So far this year things have been a little quiet on your end lately. Doom Abuse came out last year, you toured on that, and the last tour ended somewhere around December, right?

Todd Fink: I’m not good with time, but that sounds probable. So you mean, what’s happening?

Lisa Mrock: Yeah, that’s a lot of down time you guys have had. Have you guys been resting during that time?

Todd Fink: I don’t think it’s that much down time. Well, we were hoping actually to do more touring and we got stalled out by a few things. One of them is that our label went out of business right after the record came out. It’s not really their fault. We went with this label called SQE because we had a manager-friend, a guy that used to be kind of our manager-assistant, who used to be in charge of the SQE label for North America -- or I guess it’s a Canadian label, so I guess for just the States -- but they opened up this branch of it, we put out our record, and then they closed their doors. They were cool about it. They gave us our record back, and we’re just trying to figure out what we’re gonna do with it now. So we can end up booking another tour right after that. Now we’re just spending time in the studio writing new music.

LM: But man, that sucks.

TF: Yeah. It doesn’t always work. Things sometimes, they fall in line and sometimes their just...?

LM: Are you guys looking to release something on your own then, or are you looking for another label, going back to Saddle Creek?

TF: We’ll probably talk to Saddle Creek first. Actually I’ve been meaning to do that. We haven’t talked yet, but when we were deciding to go with SQE in the first place, it was between Saddle Creek and SQE. Both of them were our friends, one of them was trying to start a new thing, and we ended up going with them, not for any great reason or huge advantage, but we told Saddle Creek at that point that we wanted to do an EP or single or something after the Doom Abuse record came out, so they’re sort of expecting to us to talk to them about putting out music... And sometimes we put our own little... I mean we did one album ourselves, then we put out some no-label 12-inches. We can do that again if we’re just gonna put out songs one at a time, but it’d be nice to have a label to help with distribution and that kind of stuff.

LM: I’m sure having a label makes a lot of that stuff easier.

TF: We put out Fasciinatiion ourselves, and it was just a time-suck. Too much worrying about things that aren’t making the music or performing it or getting it ready for the tour. Not enough making music.

LM: You said you guys are in the studio writing again?

TF: Yes, we’re working on new music. I don’t know if they’re gonna be a whole album or if we’re gonna put things out after we finish them.

LM: And you also want to tour some more?

TF: Yeah.

LM: Because you have a couple shows coming up in June – Summerfest and your show in Chicago – so are you hoping to put more shows in June? Or maybe after that, like the festival circuit?

TF: No, those ones are the only ones for that trip right now because we’re trying to make new music and we want to get some more... an EP or a couple singles or whatever, we wanna get some more new stuff out before we do any more touring since we let some time lapse since Doom Abuse. And we’re interested in... I mean Doom Abuse was a record where, at least in my mind, it was more of a rock record, and it was like that thematically not because that’s the only kind of thing we were writing, but because we wanted to put all those types of songs on one record, and afterwards come out with something different. So that’s what we’re working on, something different.

LM: You guys use a lot of technology in your live sets, a lot of different programs, and I was wondering what the process is like of taking new songs and orchestrating the live show around them.

TF: Most of the time we’ve done the Faint, we’re making the songs and deciding on how they go, figuring everything out, but not necessarily being able to play them. We get them done, and then figure out how we’re gonna play them. We all contribute on all the different instruments, we’re all playing different parts and seeing what seems to work the best, put it all together, and then figure out who can do this and this, and who can do that and that. A lot of times we’ll make videos that sync to the music and then write the program, kind of more or less a DIY type of situation. On top of that, we’ll program some different scenes to accentuate what we’ve programmed for the lights on stage.

LM: You guys have been around as a band for 20 years, and technology from then to now has changed dramatically, which means I guess that your live shows have changed a lot as well. Were there certain ideas early on you guys wanted to do, but couldn’t, because the technology wasn’t there yet?

TF: Yeah, definitely. We used to keep a list of things to invent. I don’t know whatever happened to that list. It’s probably pretty funny now. We’re pretty early adopters of – I don’t mean early as a musical communication thing, which the early ‘80s... y’know – but when we were starting this band and figuring out what we could do with keyboards, it wasn’t a part of playing live we were familiar with at all. We were running into a lot of trouble with getting things to communicate and meeting certain kinds of mergers and splitters that eventually came around. Sometimes for the lighting we were having to write our own software or have a special version written for us to be able to do what we wanted to do, which is pretty basic stuff by today’s standards, but it wasn’t commercially available at the time.

LM: I guess a reverse of the last question would be if there are any ideas you guys have gotten from new technology that becomes available.

TF: Yeah. I think that technology, any new toy or instrument or whatever you wanna call it, holds a bunch of potential, a lot of potential. It’s like, what you can do with what this thing is supposed to do, and what can it do beyond what it’s supposed to do, and what if you connect two unlikely instruments together and force them to communicate in this way or that way. I think a lot of the spark of song ideas and music arrangements comes from these kinds of accidents.

LM: That’s crazy that you had to write some of your own software and write your own code just to do all that.

TF: Yeah, Clark [Baechle] my brother, he’s the drummer, is sort of a brainiac in that realm. More recently he’s been writing that kind of stuff for music to feed into graphics programs, algorithms, to do this or that kind of thing. In the old days we were just having people change this or that for us so we could do our show. Which was super cool of the people to say, “Oh I’ll change my program for you guys.”

[popmd]

Scapegoat by The Faint from Doom Abuse.

[hotgogdamn]

Help In The Head (by) the Faint

[theplacidisland]

Damage Control by The Faint

[metrochicago]

The Faint are out with a new, somewhat terrifying video for “Your Stranger.” The song is off the long anticipated full-length, Doom Abuse, their first since calling it quits back in 2008. The video mixes the band’s signature dance-punk style with a weird blacked-out figure worming about in a steaming pool and strolling and thrashing about a graveyard. One thing about The Faint that’s for sure is how much energy and fun is involved in what they do. Check out the video below and make sure to catch that energy live at Metro on the Doom Abuse Tour happening May 23. Tickets are on sale here.