Album Review

Edmonton’s Faunts debuted in 2005 with the 21st-Century shoegaze epic, High Expectations/Low Results, a haunting indie record that snuck in a number of pop gems couched in long, slow-motion exercises. It was a great record for its type, but the 2007 EP titled M4 showed a more energetic, exploratory group updating Krautrock for the hipster generation. Last fall, a strange and promising remix album was released. And now, the group returns with its first full-length in four years, a ridiculously pleasing reinterpretation of New Order and The Cure: Feel. Love. Thinking. Of.

Usually, I’d be the first to pan a group who actually sounds like other bands that came before them. But Feel… is more than just a copy of your favorite dancefloor tear-jerkers. Faunts have managed to create something so entirely recognizable that can’t help but be different from its source material. The album’s third track, “It Hurts Me All the Time,” immediately conjures up The Cure’s The Head On the Door, but rather than sounding like a stiff copy of a new wave classic, the song opens a portal directly to that euphorically depressed teenager lurking somewhere inside us all. The synths here swirl and lilt. The lyrics bemoan a love that isn’t just lost, but maybe never gained. The reverb-treated vocals seem to open out of a cloud. But something bouncy and wide-eyed ties it all together, creating a perfect three-minute pop tune of our collective memories.

Listen to “It Hurts Me All the Time”

The title track—with its drum machine beat and programmed synth lines—may send you instantly to Manchester during the early ‘80s, but something very meticulous and emotional cuts against the grain of New Order’s more mechanical dance-pop sound. “Input,” the second track, takes us away from the “I Love the Eighties” dancefloor of contemporary indie rock to a more introspective environment where the group controls small explosions of sound with deft instrumentation and an almost Calvinist sense of restraint. “Out on a Limb” shows off some mathy guitarwork in an otherwise dense and intricate composition—all of it fenced in by a chugging, locomotive beat.

Listen to “Feel. Love. Thinking. Of.”
Listen to “Input”
Listen to “Out On a Limb”

The offbeat “Lights are Always On” channels a little of the Edge’s guitar, turns up the reverb on those haunting vocals, and keeps time with a carefully-place tap of the cymbals. If there’s one thing that stands out through the album, it’s this complicated minimalism that really shows the songcrafting skills of Faunts at their best. So much, and yet so little, is happening throughout each of these songs that it gives the impression of a clean expanse of sky stretching above all the despair and dissolution of the lyrics.

The group’s Krautrock influences are patched directly on their sleeves for “Das Malefitz,” a four-minute instrumental that is desperately seeking the montage it belongs to, and yet still makes for great songwriting. I’m not sure about the jazzy guitar on “I Think I’ll Start a Fire,” a song that only really gets going at its cacophonous end. Things get more interesting with the heavier “Alarmed/Lights,” which gives the band another chance to show off their skill for restraint and timing (not to mention some awesome hand-clap action!), as well as utilize the Krautrock technique of building up from a single sound to a densely-layered one through a sort of developmental composition. This one starts with a synthesizer beep that could have been borrowed from a top-40 hip-hop track. “Explain,” the album’s last song, brings the poignant vocals and the minimalist complexity together for one undeniably uplifting experience, and one that will have a lot of listeners eagerly awaiting the group’s next development. This isn’t the tired ‘80s nostalgia of a VH1 special, this is the reworking of a now “classic” style of music, and Faunts have made it entirely their own.

Listen to “Das Malefitz”
Listen to “Explain”

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