Music Review: The Faint, Doom Abuse

By Melissa Bratcher

Sometimes when a band suffers burnout, they continue to make music anyway and that music usually blows. Omaha’s electro-punk stalwarts The Faint found themselves facing a lack of inspiration and, more importantly, fun after a year of touring for their 2008 album Fasciinatiion and instead of forging ahead and into mediocrity, effectively broke up. And they were sorely missed.

In 2013, they reformed, releasing a four-song 12” they called Preversions. Preversions led to a full-length album, Doom Abuse, and it is amazing. Imagine Kraftwerk fronted by Lemmy Kilmister. Imagine being in a room full of chainsaws hanging on wires and bears are chasing you. Doom Abuse is that exhilarating.

The album kicks off with the furious “Help In The Head,” a noise collage awash in shredding guitar and thumping bass, an industrial roar with Todd Fink’s snotty punk vocals. The pace doesn’t relent on Doom Abuse; it rages from track to track without taking a breath. “Evil Voices,” with the lyric “Evil voices lie when they say you’re alone,” which gets under your skin like a splinter, is like a frenetic, angry Echo And The Bunnymen track. The blistering pace of the second single “Salt My Doom” is a study in evil synthesizer bleeps and could very well be music for a deranged video game.

The human animal and psychic phenomena are recurring themes on Doom Abuse. “Animal Needs” boasts one of my favorite lyrics of any song: “We don’t need slacks/We don’t need crayons.” Doom Abuse is loaded with great turns of phrase, like “Hold on like good phantom limbs” from “Loss of Head.” That’s just beautiful.

Songs are beautifully produced as well. “Unseen Hand” shimmers and glitters darkly, like a swarm of beetles. “Lesson From The Darkness” is appropriately empty sounding, with echoey vocals and a palpable sense of loneliness. The album closer, “Damage Control,” is a lighter ending to a fairly intense album, epic and compressed simultaneously, with layers upon layers of sound.

With its synthesizers and those layers of sound, Doom Abuse feels very cutting edge ’80s, but not retro (stay with me here). It’s edgy and thrilling, in the way that some music from the ’80s still sounds futuristic and seems to belong to a time that hasn’t even happened yet. It’s not to say that Doom Abuse is some sort of throwback record; in fact, it’s eclectic and forward thinking and absolutely electrifying.

Doom Abuse was released by SQE Music on April 8.

Tour Dates:
April 24 – Des Moines, IA @ Wooly’s
April 25 – Madison, WI @ Barrymore Theatre
April 26 – St. Louis, MO @ The Ready Room
April 27 – Lawrence, KS @ The Bottleneck
April 30 – Tulsa, OK @ The Vanguard
May 1 – Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater
May 2 – Austin, TX @ The Belmont
May 3 – Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live – Ballroom
May 6 – Fort Lauderdale, FL @ The Culture Room
May 7 – Lake Buena Vista, FL @ House of Blues
May 9 – Jacksonville Beach, FL @ Freebird Live
May 10 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade – Heaven
May 13 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Trocadero Theatre
May 14 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Willamsburg
May 16 – Boston, MA @ Royale NightClub
May 17 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall
May 19 – New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
May 20 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
May 22 – Cleveland, OH @ House of Blues
May 23 – Chicago, IL @ Metro
May 24 – Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line Music Café
May 27 – Boise, ID @ Knitting Factory
May 28 – Spokane, WA @ Knitting Factory
May 30 – Seattle, WA @ Neptune
May 31 – Portland, OR @ Roseland Theater
June 1 – San Francisco, CA @ The Independent
June 2 – San Francisco, CA @ The Independent
June 5 – Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory
June 6 – Los Angeles,, CA @ The Roxy Theatre
June 7 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Roxy Theatre
June 8 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Roxy Theatre
June 11 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The Depot
June 12 – Englewood, CO @ Gothic Theatre
June 13 – Omaha, NE @ Sokol Auditorium