podcast by Chance Solem-Pfeifer and Jacob Zlomke | intro by Jacob Zlomke

Audio Review

The Faint’s sixth studio album, Doom Abuse, finds Omaha’s electronic punk band’s return to course after a six year hiatus since 2008’s Fasciinatiion.

If on Fasciinatiion, the Faint explored more calculated, cerebral territory, then on Doom Abuse, they careened back their instinctive roots. Frontman Todd Fink’s own rhetoric surrounding the album speaks to a more natural approach regarding the band’s process in recording and writing Doom Abuse.

The result is indeed reminiscent of the slew of albums released during the Faint’s rise to prominence: Blank-Wave Arcade, Danse Macabre and Wet From Birth.

It’s an album thematically made paranoid by current condition, ignited, maybe, by a looming Big Brother. But musically, Doom Abuse, full of The Faint’s signature screeching electronic keyboards and Fink’s chanting, modified voice, couldn’t, from a technological point, exist in a time where such fears weren’t artistic parlance. There’s no nostalgia or sentimentality, only violent anxiety. Tracks like “Help in the Head” revisit the same psychic claustrophobia of band standby “Paranoiattack.”

In the early 2000s, the Faint may have been part of a larger national music trend, similarly pioneered by the likes of Death From Above 1979 and Mindless Self Indulgence. But in 2014, the band appears to have outlived, or out-persevered, its own peers.

Doom Abuse isn’t one entry among many in a community of like-minded acts like, say, Wet From Birth. Instead, the Faint is now much more on its own island.

The On The Record podcast team is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor Chance Solem-Pfeifer and staff writer Jacob Zlomke. Reach them at chancesp@hearnebraska.org and jacobz@hearnebraska.org.