A Few Questions for The Faint
The Faint are playing a sold out show Saturday night with Shy Child and Jaguar Love at the 9:30 Club. Doors open at 8 p.m. |
Although Bright Eyes became the defining face and sound on Omaha's Saddle Creek Records, arguably it was The Faint who helped first bring the label into the spotlight with their synthy, dance-punk anthems. The Faint not only made people dance, they made people think, with songs like "Agenda Suicide" and "Paranoiattack" taking stabs at more high-minded social fare. Their latest offering, Fasciinatiion, continues their trend of combining socio-political anthems and vocoder-drenched (anti-)love songs. It also marks their break from Saddle Creek, as they've decided to start their own record label, blank.wav, to put out this album. After the jump, keyboardist Jacob Thiele talks about their decision to create their own record label, addresses misconceptions about the band and explains why they respect works of science fiction.
How has starting your own record label changed the way the recording process has gone for you?
Starting our own label didn’t have as much to do with the recording process as much as getting our own studio did. I think that the studio was like a dream come true and then allowed us to have all kinds of time, like, as much time as we needed to work on the record and not having to worry about having another band come in or being done at a certain hour or something. You can just keep working through the night. Which is great for us because some of us work better in the morning and some of us work better in the middle of the night. It is cool to have our own label. We didn’t know what we were going to do for this record and we looked at some options. And we just felt that digital sales being the way they are that the timing was finally right for us to create our own label. It’s something we’ve been talking about doing for a long time just because we have The Faint but there are various other projects coming from members of the Faint that we get involved with and now we would have a home for those too, possibly.
What are some of the acts you are looking at bringing into the new label?
Well, we would love to bring in other bands, even just our side projects, but we’ve kind of dispersed the release of our own record and it’s kind of a big one and it’s kind of expensive to fund. We need to make sure that we don’t lose money on it before we sign anybody else on. So, it’s in the distant future that we’d be signing other bands.
Did you spend a lot of the intervening four years since the release of Wet From Birth writing and recording for the new record?
Yeah. Well, more than we have on any of the other records. We toured pretty extensively in 2005 and started to build the studio in November of 2005. We played some shows here and there just to keep our heads above water financially and help fund the studio construction. The studio took about two years to complete. We worked on the music all that time. We wrote a bunch of songs that since we weren’t able to get into the studio for awhile, we picked most of the ones for the album and then just kept polishing them and making them better and trying to figure out different changes that we could make to balance the album as a whole and to make some of the songs stand apart from one another. So we picked the songs well before we started recording and then we went into the studio and recorded some other songs for B-sides, I suppose. We still haven’t mixed any of those. The studio was finished about a year ago so it took five or six months to record everything and a couple of months to mix it.
On previous tours, there's been a strong visual aspect to your live show. Can you give us any idea as to what we can expect on this tour?
We got really tired of always having the screens behind us so we replaced them with this weird black plastic material that reflects video projections. So it’s kind of like an invisible screen back there. It’s not quite as bright. We have a lot of lights and we’ve started putting little cameras around the stage and just kind of blowing up the feed from the camera for very high contrast black and white footage of us playing. It’s interesting, it’s been kind of a process trying to figure out how to do all that. But it’s really high energy. There’s a lot of precise lighting stuff and the videos are pretty articulately timed as well. This creates more of an overall experience for all of the senses rather than just a performance of the songs.
The thematic elements of many of The Faint's songs don't waver too far from the thematic elements in a lot of works of science fiction. Are any of you science fiction fans?
None of us are real science fiction buffs or anything but we do have an interest in science fiction, especially as an art form. I think it’s a really important art form whether it’s written, pictures, movies or whatever because it creates a dialogue about why we should keep science and government and things like that in check; and explores possibilities of things gone awry. I think we should take those kind of works seriously. We read a lot of science magazines around the studio. None of us are weird Star Trek fans or anything like that who wear T-shirts and go to conventions.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about The Faint?
I'm not sure anymore, at this point. It used to be that we were really depressed, goth, didn't have a sense of humor, that we took everything very seriously. My biggest misconception personally with the reviews that I have read is that I can't figure out whether people are disappointed that we didn't change our sound more, or that we don't sound enough like what we used to. I guess that's probably a good thing.