The Faint arrived at a wonky time in synth history: too late to be considered Devo, but too early for the tidal wave of Hot Chips and LCD Soundsystems. They were just doing their own thing, making black jeans sweaty in every town that they played.
They started out as an emo guitar band: there were lilting vocals and jagged Brit-pop riffs and Spock haircuts. Then in 1999, they molted. And nobody expected the guys who hung out with Bright Eyes and Cursive to suddenly start wearing matching turtlenecks and showing up with octapads.
Blank Wave Arcade marked a clear point of disruption for these young men from Omaha; they were going through some shit and coped by making fun Eurobeat trash. And hey, eastern Nebraska is not usually known for its dance floor culture, which is part of what makesBlank Wave Arcade the consistent treasure that it is today.
The album turns 25 this month, so I caught up with Todd Fink, principal songwriter for The Faint, to dish on melting lights, ditching classical guitar and using fake names for remixes.
When did The Faint decide to go in the direction of synth music?
Fink: We got to a point after touring on Media (the first album) that it felt like everybody was doing the same thing. We were playing with a bunch of bands and we just blended in with them. And we all sounded like Pavement on guitar. We thought, "okay, let's do the things that seem like we shouldn't."
So that was working with the Korg-n-Nord sound?
Fink: We had keyboards the whole time, before. And it just sucked having them. It was a guitar time. At first it was like, "you shouldn't have keyboards in bands, that's for old guys in cover bands."
Oh yeah man. It was not cool.
Fink: (Laughs) It was not cool! In the electronic world…we liked electronic music, but we didn't have the faintest idea how to make it. It was a type of sorcery. It still is. There's a vast difference between how we're making music and what Aphex Twin and Squarepusher are doing. We just like the idea of using a synthesizer because we had heard that you can make any sound that you can imagine. There were notable limitations to guitar.
How did this all start? What kind of music were you into at the time?
Fink: I was working at (Omaha record store) Homer's for six and a half years, a long time. I was ordering the imports for them and I spent a lot of time there knowing all of the genres of music. There were always a lot of artists. For me, I never really did a lot of jazz.
No jazz. There you go. So being around all this music pushed you to make your own?
Fink: I wanted to do music, I was obsessed with it, but I felt like I was spending all my time at the record shop. My long-term goal was to be able to go to any city, and then there would be people there for our show. And that happened right after Blank Wave Arcade.
Did you have any formal education with music, beyond the work at Homer's?
Fink: I remember studying music at college and begging them to let me be a music major. They asked me if I could sing and I said "no". But then they hit a note on a piano and said, "can you sing this note?" I said "I know you need people, so why don't you just let me do it?" Then I worked really hard and learned classical guitar and then never picked it up again after I graduated.
That must have fed into your sense of composition.
Fink: I learned how to listen to music better; how to lift something up chromatically, or how to have all of the voices kind of go in the same direction. It was valuable to me. It was also interesting to hear all of the classical people talk about their version of good music, then I would go home and listen to Shudder to Think and Fugazi and try to determine if this was good music (laughs).
You guys were an Omaha band, but you recorded BWA in Lincoln?
Fink: Kinda, yeah. This one was actually recorded an exit or two before you get to Lincoln from Omaha at the Mogis Brothers house. They had a basement recording studio.
Were there any demos?
Fink: We didn't really do any demos. If we kind of had a song, we just thought it would come together in the studio.
What were you eating during those sessions?
Fink: We were eating pizza at Yia Yia's, uptown in Lincoln. In general, we were eating junk food. We were still kids coming off of a life of skateboarding, which means Mountain Dew and Pop Tarts and chips and Taco Bell.
Did you ever think about modding the songs from Media to later play with the synth lineup?
Fink: No. Once we found our sound on Blank Wave Arcade, it was no looking back. When I write songs in a major key, I just get tired of them. There's something just too happy about it. And I love being happy, but I don't like to sing in a major key.
Part of how BWA became known was for your live show, which had also evolved.
Fink: Lights were a pretty big component of what we were doing on the Blank Wave tour. And the bass player (Joel Peterson) would hit different foot switches to change the flood lights to match the changes in a song. We'd put gels over them, to give them color. But we'd tape them directly onto the light. So then the gels and tape would melt and noxious gasses would just come up!
And smoke machines were even way less cool than synthesizers, when we started using them. Nobody knew if we were allowed to use smoke machines, because nobody had asked before. They were usually just used for Halloween. So we'd show up and a lot of times the smoke alarms would go off. We were learning from mistakes.
Speaking of mistakes, I booked you guys to play the basement of a Mexican restaurant in Columbus, OH on that tour.
Fink: Really?
Yeah, it was fun but there was no PA. That was embarrassing.
Fink: I remember that. Hey, it's not unusual that the PA isn't up to snuff when you're playing burrito places. I remember the little flags hanging down along the ceiling.
Do you have any fond memories of the BWA tour, when you were playing smaller venues?
Fink: I got in the habit of asking where the pool party was afterwards on the mic, and that made things more fun. Also, it improved our chances of getting a place to stay. And we went out with The Vue. I recently went through some old footage of that tour and thought, "these bands are great." Vue still sounded really good and had great energy.
The lyrics from BWA shifted to a more sexual nature. Was that part of a personal awakening on your part, or just what felt best in terms of the tone of the music?
Fink: For one thing, that's what's going on in a person at that age. A lot of that kind of thought. I also felt like those thoughts were kind of taboo or in questionable taste. And I was kind of looking for things that were in questionable taste.
Sparks were an example for me, at that time. "Angst in My Pants" was a song that was an example of what Iiked about going in that direction. The lyrics are there to get your attention and to bring ideas into your head, about yourself, about what the song means. I was interested in polarizing people because that's where the energy is. Do more things that only you would do, and that you would feel comfortable doing.
I hate to bring this full circle, but that's a very jazz thing to say.
Fink: (Laughs) When I say I didn't like jazz, it's because I knew I wanted to keep a genre for later. I'm saving it for when I'm old.
Is there going to be any re-release of BWA at any point?
Fink: That is in the works, yes. We just remixed one of the songs for the second disc.
We have a remix record from Blank Wave that was only released on picture disc way back. So some of the better remixes from that will be on this new release. But back then we didn't know any electronic artists, y'know, living in Nebraska, so we did a lot of the remixes ourselves under fake names (Laughs).
For music, tour dates and merch from The Faint, please visit https://www.thefaint.com/
Lee Keeler is a writer and educator living in northeast Los Angeles.
Previously:
• RayonBase's fusion of synth-pop, country, alternative, rock, and jazz blows my mind
• This 'magnetic' performance by synth-pop band Future Islands is one of the best I've seen
• Budokan Boys make nightmarish saxophone-laden synth pop
• Gary War: 'Jared's Lot' music review
• Listen to 'All The Small Things' in the style of a Rick Astley-esque 80s synth pop song
• Strawberry Switchblade is one of my favorite 1980s bands
• Soviet Synthpop of the 80s