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So it’s been 4 years now since everyone’s favorite dance/rock/nu-wave outfit The Faint released their fourth and most successful album Wet From Birth. In that time rumors and plans for their fourth have been leaked many times and yet we still had nothing…until now. Fasciinatiion will be released on August 5th via the group’s own label, blank.wav. This means the longtime Saddle Creek artists are going the way of Rilo Kiley so they can do things on their own. It is in that same vein that Fasciinatiion came together, it will be the group’s first album that was written, recorded, produced and released on their own.

We here at the Schmarm can’t wait. No new tracks are up on their site yet but I’d bet if you keep checking something will be going up soon. www.thefaint.com

from the press release:

Fasciinatiion is an album that draws on many defining facets of The Faint’s sound, while remaining completely different from anything else they’ve put out. A record whose themes include predictions and the future, tabloid culture, the allure of what may never be, childhood lost and more, Fasciinatiion sounds as if it’s been beamed in from a satellite whose sole purpose is observing, and making sense of, the details of every day existence. In certain ways, the album is the most mechanical and precise of the band’s work: Todd’s voice sounds less human than ever before; the bass lines are more mangled, keyboards spiral and squeal out of control; electronic pings and stabs invade the melodies; the lyrical anxiety and disdain of previous albums pervades almost every song on Fasciinatiion. Opener “Get Seduced” is The Faint at their best, the song’s critique of celebrity culture matched with one of the finest choruses they’ve ever written. First single “The Geeks Were Right” draws on the tenets of futurist literature and sliding, siren-call guitars. “Fulcrum and Lever” marries ambient noise with space references, alienation and a stuttering, flexing beat, while “Mirror Error” explores identity and consciousness within its perfect, propulsive electro-pop, its choruses swirling high and taking Todd’s voice up with it. Closer “A Battle Hymn for Children” flinches with nervous rhythms against resentment of the future to be inherited and keyboards that sound like flailing voices (or is it flailing voices that sound like keyboards? On Fasciinatiion, one can never tell).