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Pitchfork Review
February 23, 2009
Pitchfork Review 7.2/10
There are many dubious reasons for a band to release a remix album, whether it’s to kill a contract or kill time. But when Edmonton quintet Faunts released theirs (the imaginatively titled Faunts Remixed) late last year, it was a logical continuation of a process that began with 2006’s M4EP, which saw the band’s hazy sprawl refashioned into extended electronic-based workouts. Now, Faunts’ second full-length, Feel. Love. Thinking. Of., provides greater evidence that the remix project helped not simply to reconstuct the band’s back catalogue, but the group itself: slow-motion shoegazers reborn as purveyors of luminous and deeply affecting electronic pop.
There is, of course, precedent for this sort of evolution—most notably, Joy Division’s transition into New Order. But beyond a surface stylistic debt, Faunts share with their Manchester forbears the ability to vividly reflect their surrounding urban environment in their music. If you’ve never spent a winter in Edmonton—a sizeable but geographically remote city in central Alberta—Feel. Love. Thinking. Of. reconstructs the sensation well, with an austere presentation that effectively puts the “ice” in isolation, but infused with beautifully melancholic melodies that beg for the thaw.
Part and parcel of this transfromation is the promotion of the voice from obscured, textural detail to emotional focal point, with Faunts’ trio of singers—brothers Steven and Tim Batke, and Paul Amusch—stepping up to join Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan and the Notwist’s Markus Acher in the pantheon of sad-robot balladeers. And like those bands, Faunts’ production intricacy is nicely complemented by their emotional simplicity: While the pulse-quickening opening title track approximates the rush of a burgeoning romance, second song “Input” has already fast-forwarded to relationship’s end, the emotional stagnation and disconnect echoed by a skittering beat that struggles to cohere into a groove.
But rather than play on typical human-vs-synthetic dynamics, Faunts score their most moving performances when their singers are at their most numb, and must rely on technology to fill in the blanks: the effects-pedal fireworks that close out the haunting “Lights Are Always On”, or the quivering, pitch-shifted synth line that essentially serves as the wordless chorus for Amusch’s “It Hurts Me All the Time”—a track that, for all the contemporary bands dancing on Joy Division’s grave, is one of the few to capture the glacial beauty of “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
For an album mostly preoccupied with cataloguing past relationships and the mistakes that did them in, it follows that Feel. Love. Thinking. Of. would manifest those feelings with nostalgic sounds, some welcome (“Das Malfitz”, which reimagines Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in The Wall, Pt. 1” as a vintage Detroit-techno track), others less so (the too-slick guitar riff underpinning “I Think I’ll Start a Fire” that sounds like an attempt to further last fall’s unwanted Fixx resurgence). And if the album’s more languorous second side serves up too much wallow and not enough wallop, it could just be a strategy to make closer “Explain” feel all the more euphoric: with a fade-in a la New Order’s “Temptation”, the song springs forth on a sunset-bound motorik beat and waves of rippling guitar riffs that carry with them the promise to leave all those doomed romances, regrets, and miserable winters behind. This year in Edmonton, spring comes early.
NEW RECORD OUT FEB 17TH!!!
December 10, 2008
Write what you know. It is the most common advice offered to young songwriters, and it’s probably the best. But in the case of Faunts’ approach to songwriting, such advice would be misguided and reductive at best. This is a group of musicians who write what they can imagine. At once symphonic and sprawling; ambient, yet driving, Faunts’ latest articulation, the full-length Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. (out February 17th, 2009 on Friendly Fire Recordings) is the culmination of a year of touring, recording, and meticulous exploration of this transcendent imagination. With its effervescent guitars, mathematic loops and synthesizers, surging drums, and seemingly nomadic bass lines, Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. is a fluid expression of Faunts’ painstaking attention to instrumentation and arrangement which allows the buoyantly defiant mood of the record to transverse any one song in particular. This is a band of perfectionists – every movement agonized over, every melody deconstructed and explored – whose labors have resulted in an expansive, layered, textured, and sublime collaboration.Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. perfectly encompasses the band’s ambitious, imaginative devotion to sculpting not only a musical moment, but an entire atmosphere which accompanies that moment.
Born out of the dark autumn months that settled over Edmonton, Alberta (in western Canada, six hours north of Montana) in late 2000, Faunts’ original lineup consisted of brothers Tim and Steven Batke and Paul Arnusch. After turning an old office space into a studio, the three spent a full year creating their magically haunting debut album, High Expectations/Low Results, which immediately established the band as an up-and-coming presence in the Canadian music scene.
Following the success of Results, Faunts evolved into a five-piece ensemble with the addition of Joel Hitchcock, and turned their attention to their second release, M4. Composed of scores initially created to accompany three independent short films, M4 (which also had its title track featured-to critical acclaim-in Bioware’s multimillion-selling Xbox 360 video game, Mass Effect) is a quintessential demonstration of Faunts’ ongoing love affair with complexly layered melodies and soaring refrains. It also yielded the extraordinary animated video for the song “M4 (Part II)”, which appeared multiple times on MTV2’s “Subterranean” and brought the band a slew of new fans from the animation and gaming communities.
Fall of 2008 saw the release of Faunts Remixed, which built on the success of Faunts’ first two efforts. The album features reworked tracks from both Results and M4 with contributions from artists working at the forefront of the North American electronic music scene: Cadence Weapon, Mark Templeton, Brightest Feathers (aka Saxon Shore), San Serac, and the Paronomasiac (aka Nik Kozub from Shout Out Out Out Out).
Now with the addition of Scott Gallant a third Batke brother, Rob, Faunts have given us Feel.Love.Thinking.Of., an album that is both more ambitious and sprawling in its conception and tighter and more focused in its execution than anything the band has done before. A more vocal, song-oriented album than its predecessors, Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. contains some truly sublime moments: the electronic pulse of the eponymous title track, the bending synths on “It Hurts Me all the Time” that almost evoke the singing saw, the krautrock-y slow burn of “Alarmed/Lights”, the emotive refrain of album closer “Explain”. With Feel.Love.Thinking.Of., Faunts have outgrown any old comparisons and developed into their own entity, and the results couldn’t be better.
Faunts
Feel.Love.Thinking.Of.
(Friendly Fire)
Street date: Feb. 17, 2009
1. Feel.Love.Thinking.Of.
2. Input
3. It Hurts Me all the Time
4. Out on a Limb
5. Lights are Always On
6. Das Malefitz
7. I Think I’ll Start a Fire
8. Alarmed/Lights
9. So Far Away
10. Explain