Let’s give The Faint the credit they are due: they could very well be riding the crest of the corporate new-wave revival that they should be credited for helping pioneer. After 2001’s Danse Macabre, they likely could have inked with any number of major labels and doomed current platinum-selling shlock like The Killers to also-ran “second coming of The Faint” status. Instead, they decided to stick with the lady they came to the dance with, sticking with their hometown Saddle Creek label and remaining content to build on their feverishly devoted grassroots fan base and, in the process, retaining complete control over their music. Their songs may not be getting the American Idol “pimpmercial” treatment from aspiring superstars, but judging by the big ol’ tour bus the band rolled up to Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater in last night, they’re doing all right for themselves.

The band was in town to kick off about a month’s worth of dates and chose Milwaukee as the opening date perhaps out of a sense of nostalgia; heck, i still remember living in Oshkosh and driving to Milwaukee back in, what, 1999? 2000? to see The Faint rock the Bremen House basement with the long-forgotten Chicago band ICBM. Brew City was on the Faint bandwagon nearly from the start (of their retro-synth-pop incarnation, anyway), and it’s unlikely that they’ve forgotten.

Let’s get my personal biases out of the way here. My take on The Faint’s recorded output can be summed up like this: Blank Wave Arcade is a fantastic and original blend of the Midwestern indie rock on their forgettable debut, Media, and the 80s synth-pop that dominates the rest of their recorded output. Danse Macabre eliminated what was interesting about that hybrid, opting instead to begin the slide into retro novelty (including practically ripping off “Mexican Radio” on one track–”Posed to Death,” i believe), and with the exception of the killer “Drop Kick the Punks,” Wet From Birth is pretty much garbage.

So, i went to the show tonight thanks to the good graces of my friend Lindsey, who had scored free tickets. Not having seen the band since 2001, i was curious to see how the live show’s evolved.

The band took the stage silhouetted by the large white video screens behind them (although one could still see that singer Todd Fink apparently decided it’d be fun to resemble a heroin-chic version of American Idol finalist Blake Lewis)–quite the technical step up from the old-school light show they used to run back in the Blank Wave days. The crowd was most definitely pro-Faint, and the Pabst was nonstop mass of ass-shaking from the first note of the opening number “Birth” (er, i’m pretty sure it was “Birth,” anyway–i listened to that record about twice before i broke the CD-R my friend burned it onto for me).

As the band is working on writing a new album (that according to ‘net rumors might come out on American Recordings? Oops, looks like i may have spoken too soon with all that “hey, they’ve stayed indie” talk), they sprinkled a liberal dose of new stuff into the set, so look forward to that if you’re a fan. To the ears of one who hated their last album, the new songs were delightfully noisy and may end up being a marked improvement from the last two releases. My favorite of the pack was a completely over-the-top 80s ballad during the encore that had Lindsey and me miming the Molly-Ringwald-puts-her-earring-in-Judd-Nelson’s-hand sequence in The Breakfast Club. The new songs also keep The Faint’s trademark fat-and-sassy synths in full force, which had always been my favorite part of the band’s sound, regardless of what i thought about the actual songs.

The overall performance, though, while enough to send Milwaukee’s tweener set into spastic glee, rang slightly hollow to me. I’ll explain:

The entire set featured some seriously impressive coordination between the band and its video show. Images pulsed in rhythm with the sequences and Clark Baechle’s drumming; more impressively, floating heads lip-synced Fink’s vocals perfectly. Obviously The Faint are shooting for a flawless multimedia overload, and the amount of rehearsing necessary to become tight enough to pull this off should be recognized and commended. Still (and this is personal preference, but that’s why we’re here, right?), having an entire band and visual presentation slaved to the click track necessary to pull this off takes away from the feeling of immediacy and, well, liveness that i like seeing in a live show. My favorite shows are the ones where the band is careening off the tracks but still holding it together. Nothing is more exciting that the idea that anything can happen because the band is flying live without a net. That’s what distinguishes a live show from the recording in my eyes and ears. That tightrope act is impossible to replicate when the entire live show is held together by machines. Impossible. I’m not saying that pure unfettered live performance is intrinsically better than an uber-rehearsed stage show, but it is what i prefer.

Late in the set, the band launched into a pair of old school hits from Blank Wave and the crowd went absolutely nuts. When the guitars went horribly out of tune at the beginning of “Victim Convenience,” i followed suit. A mistake! The band members are human after all! It’s a little depressing to me that the most organic and pure moment of the set was a mistake; imperfections, after all, are what make a live show compelling, but when the rest of the live show is so stale and over-rehearsed, the errors are all we have to hold on to in order to remember each show distinctly and uniquely.

Oh, by the way, there were opening bands as well, but the less said about them, the better. Duo The Berg Sans Nipple played a pleasant enough brand of Afro-beat enhanced ambient electronica, but they will ultimately be remembered in my head as proof that we have finally run out of decent band names. New York duo Services (whose web page i cannot find because a Google search for “Services band New York” really doesn’t get you much in the way of specifics) basically pushed some buttons on a pair of synths, played some dance beats, and jumped around like jackasses on crank for a half hour. To call their half-assed i-bet-they’re-big-in-East-Village-house-parties performance art an abortion doesn’t really cut it. No, their performance was a partial birth abortion; the phrase “intact dilation and extraction” is a sanitized medical term that hides the ugly truth of what Services accomplish with their act. They make your brain feel like it was sucked out through a hole that was bashed in your skull. And not in a good way, either.

The Faint are out for three weeks to a month–check ‘em out if it’s your thing:

TUE
5.22 Chicago, IL
Metro

WED
5.23 Toronto, ONT
Opera House

THU
5.24 Buffalo, NY
Town Ballroom

FRI
5.25 Philadelphia, PA
Making Time @ Pure

SAT
5.26
Boston, MA
The Avalon

SUN
5.27 New York, NY
Motherfucker @ Webster Hall

MON
5.28
Washington, DC
9:30 Club

WED
5.30 Norfolk, VA
Norva

THU
5.31 Asheville, NC
Orange Peel

FRI
6.01 Knoxville, TN
Blue Cat’s

SAT
6.02 Columbia, MO
Blue Note

SUN
6.03 Tulsa, OK
Cain’s Ballroom

MON
6.04 Boulder, CO
Fox Theatre

TUE
6.05 Boulder, CO
Fox Theatre

WED
6.06 Salt Lake City, UT
In the Venue

THU
6.07 Las Vegas, NV
House Of Blues

FRI
6.08 San Diego, CA
SOMA

SAT
6.09 Mountain View, CA
Live 105 BFD 2007 @ Shoreline Amphitheatre

MON
6.11
Boise, ID
Big Easy

THU
6.14 Omaha, NE
Sokol Auditorium

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