If any of you have known me for long enough, you'll known I love The Faint's 2008 album Fasciination. I loved it so much I pushed it during my high school news broadcast's music segment. Well, it's been 6 years and The Faint are back with Doom Abuse, an album I am loving.
While I don't totally love The Faint's back catalog, Fasciination was a perfect album for me, a combination of electro-style synths and basslines with a rock band behind them and an eccentric vocalist behind it all, giving me catchy yet out there lyrics in what would come to define my idea of Dance Rock/Dance Pop music for a very long time. With Doom Abuse The Faint drop a large portion of the bouncy Electro synths for noisey ones and a harder rock edge, but it's still the same band and still giving me exactly what I never knew I wanted.
Doom Abuse is a short blast of danceable, weird pop rock. They come in at 12 songs in just over 39 minutes. The songs are catchy and convey just as much as they need to before jumping to the next one. Allmusic review James Christopher Monger called this iteration of The Faint "Equal parts whimsical and despondent, it's Disintegration-era Cure, wearing an Imagine Dragons hoodie trying to have an LCD Soundsystem "All My Friends" moment." While that is a lot to swallow, I think it's pretty apt. The lyrics are often on the downward slope, about the decline of one's mental health, the degradation of society and a cynical view of how the world is changing, but told through upbeat, rocking numbers you can't help but move along with. Two of the biggest examples of this are the back-to-back combo of Mental Radio and Evil Voices, pairing lyrics like "Evil voices lie when they say you're alone" with arguably the catchiest songs on the album. On tracks like Salt My Doom they go for a noiser edge, tapping into their punk influences for a short, shouty number. Help In The Head is the opening track and pretty much a combination of both previous styles, being catchy and flippant, but also dark and with a noisey overtone. While not the best song on the album, it gives you a damn good idea of what the rest of the music is going to sound like, more or less. If you like Help In the Head, you'll like the rest of the album. The track Animal Needs might be the most The Faint song out of all of them, with a strong synth riff and a pounding drum beat play while the lyrics talk about what they do and don't need, which comes down to pretty much, we don't need anything from structured society, but they have the same needs as an animal." An anthemic track you can dance along too with a message about society.
Doom Abuse is the kind of album that makes me fall in love with a band. Their Dark Wave/Dance Punk outlook has enough twists and turns in between songs while still keeping to a very similar and established sound throughout the piece. The only time it really lets off is the final track, a beautiful but slower piece named Damage Control. While not a revolutionary album in itself, it's a totally different experience from most popular music going on today, with just as many catchy riffs, hooks and choruses. At under 40 minutes, it's really just a fun experience to put on and let it play all the way through, and when it's done I'm ready to start at the beginning all over again.
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