Although we are grateful for our lovely modern gizmos, the consequent deluge of culture and information has made it tricky to pinpoint precisely what makes a record "classic." Perhaps rips of uneasy dance punk laced with pulsing splashes of noir electro such as the Faint's "Agenda Suicide" and "Let the Poison Spill From Your Throat" helped you forget Linkin Park existed in 2001. If so, the Faint's reissued and remastered Danse Macabre 10th-anniversary edition may fit your criteria for canonization. However, singer Todd Fink respectfully disagrees. "I'm not a particularly nostalgic person," he says by phone from Enamel Studio in the band's hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. "I'm pretty much living in the present, maybe dreaming of the future. But I don't fuck around with the past much."
While the nine tracks off Danse have been plugged into a set list slated to liquefy the Paradise Saturday, any band capable of getting comfortable leaning on nostalgia never would've recorded the Faint's breed of damaged future-pop in the first place. Whereas innumerable other bands grow complacent over time, Fink — after nearly 20 years — is still rethinking what th Faint should sound like. "I DJ'd a lot and listened to other music really loud, which is why I like electronic music," he says. "One way that influenced us is we learned to have a little more of a minimalistic approach. Now we're seeing how far we can take that. We'll probably take it too far before we find a middle ground."
>> BARRYTHOMPSON84@GMAIL.COM
THE FAINT + ICKY BLOSSOMS + TRUST :: Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston :: December 8 @ 7 pm :: 18+ :: $22 :: 617.562.8800 or thedise.com
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Music Features
, THE FAINT, electronic, music features
