The Faint is about to hit the road for a month-long tour, but no, the band has not recently released anything. Don't worry, you didn't miss it.
As is protocol with the Omaha, Nebraska boys, they are defying convention and in fact launching a tour before launching the new album -- which, at this point, has not so much as an official title, much less a release date.
Fact is, The Faint hasn't put out a new record since 2004's "Wet From Birth" -- but don't mistake the lag time for languor. According to drummer Clark Baechle, a perpetual cycle of touring has left little time for writing music over the last few years, but the good news is that The Faint doesn't have to wait for the new record to come out to enjoy its new material, and neither do we. The new tour kicks off here in Milwaukee at the Pabst Theater on Monday, May 21.
"If you're going to have three or four years between albums, it's nice to remind people that you're still a band," says Baechle of his synth pop outfit consisting of his brother Todd Fink, Jacob Thiele, Joel Peterson and Dapose. "And it's nice for us to get out there -- we're itching to play the new songs live."
The way he sees it, touring with new songs before recording them is the best way to refine and perfect them for the album.
"When you play a song over and over again on a tour, by the end of it you feel like you know the song -- not just know the parts, but know what the song needs. It's great to get the crowd reaction and most of the time parts gradually change throughout the tour."
So what does The Faint have in store for the masses? Baechle mentions meandering ever so slightly into different musical directions with the upcoming album -- the band's done four with hometown Saddle Creek Records, but there's still no word yet as to which label the new one will be on -- but assures us that, for all intents and purposes, it's the same Faint you've come to know and love since 1999's "Blank Wave Arcade" set the dance punk pace.
"We're trying for something a little more fresh," he says. "We're not going way off the deep end or anything, but we're writing it slightly differently that "Wet From Birth," which was more or less written in front of a computer."
This time, he says, recording is going to be done the old fashioned way -- actually setting up and playing instruments as if they were on stage to achieve a sound that's a bit more raw, a bit more real.
It's admittedly hard to imagine a relatively stripped down Faint record that isn't saturated in ass-shaking synthetic beeps and bloops, but you can be the judge as the band test drives its new material at The Pabst show with Services & The Berg Sans Nipple and a pre-show set by Milwaukee's The Demix.
OnMilwaukee.com staff writer Julie Lawrence grew up in Wauwatosa and has lived her whole life in the Milwaukee area.
As any “word nerd” can attest, you never know when inspiration will strike, so from a very early age Julie has rarely been seen sans pen and little notebook. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee it seemed only natural that she major in journalism. When OnMilwaukee.com offered her an avenue to combine her writing and the city she knows and loves in late 2004, she knew it was meant to be. Around the office, she answers to a plethora of nicknames, including “Lar,” (short for “Larry,” which is short for “Lawrence”) as well as the mysteriously-sourced “Bill Murray.”
