Music to dance to and have sex to.

Recently, I got a job working at a tiny little music store that's been there for twenty-five years without anyone noticing. The reason nobody cares about this music store is because it carries albums that absolutely nobody has ever heard of, except for...no, wait, that's a definite 'nobody'.

The job pays horribly and the space is borderline-claustraphobic. The people I work with are rude, snooty indie elitists who would need a Top 40 radio shoved up their ass before they listened. The people who come in are mostly nonexistent, so it's about two hours a day of sitting back at the cash register with my thumbs a-twiddlin'.

I love my job now. Because I got this CD from it for free.

And what should somebody expect from a band like The Faint? Their songs are keyboard-and-computer-blip driven. From the first lyric of the (oddly violin-filled) opener "Desperate Guys" to the last pulsing riff of the closer "Birth"...every single song is about sex. It's indie electronica, and above all, it is very, very strange.

You should expect sneaky, subversive perfection, that's what.

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It's a shame that The Faint are so obscure, because this would make great club music. Everyone on the dance floor (even the party-pooper types who never have any fun) would be shaking their groove thang.

Take the song "How Could I Forget?", for example. The keyboard pulses along with the drums, a song that absolutely begs to be danced to--and who am I to deny it that right? In the lyric sheet, it is written as a conversation between a boy and a girl on the dance floor. The girl is trying her damnedest to ignore the boy, and the boy wants nothing more than to...er, let's just say "impress her" for the sake of tact.

Boy: All the things you said were pointless
And now you go on dropping names.
...
Mmmm, but I kind of dig you.

I have never written a song meant for people to dance to, so I guess I have no right to say this...but it can't be easy to portray that kind of wit in a dance song.

The opener (that would be "Desperate Guys") starts off with a strange little violin piece, building into an electronic kind of meltdown. It sounds synthesized as hell, but really, you can hear the musicians underneath the computer beeping, and they are skilled musicians. The singer sounds a little bit like Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, only a little less nasal and a lot faster.

"I Disappear" is a mostly bass-driven song, written as a sort of out-of-body experience. (Or a bad acid trip, but maybe I'm the only one who sees that.) The songs are repetitive within each other, often borrowing melodies or riffs from one another, but it doesn't come off as tiresome. Instead it brings a welcome familiarity to the songs, a crafty way to make you feel like you've heard them somewhere before.

Another example of The Faint as lyricists comes in the form of "Southern Belles in London Sing". As musicians, they have chosen to bury their talent underneath electronica tools a mile deep, with keyboards galore to layer over the acoustic melody. They're a good example of what Dirty Vegas would sound like if Dirty Vegas didn't suck.

Georgian femmes are gone for weeks,
Southern belles in London sing.

In my mind, the album's centerpiece is in the song titled, simply, "Erection." It's a sardonic ode to a man's...actually, I bet you can figure that one out. The keyboard buzzing in the foreground and the bass thumping in the back come together to make a perfect melody, an electronica version of the Mona Lisa without the enigma. Because really, a song entitled "Erection" couldn't be that hard to figure out.

However, this goes to show how amazing the album is. "Erection" works as a sort of centerpiece to the album, that's true. But it doesn't set an impossible standard for the rest of the CD. Instead, it works as a sort of rite of passage for the songs, so that the songs before it feel like an excellent lead-up and the ones after function as a way to keep you on your toes. They pull you right into a new style with the political song "Paranoiattack."

This song is not buried underneath yards of electronica tools the way some of the others are. Their musicianship is more upfront, with the lead singer shouting nearly incomprehensibly.

"Dropkick the Punks" reverses the musical order, putting the guitar in the back and the bass upfront. In the foreground, the singer is counting in German and then at the end screaming "Revolution 101!"

Back to the electronica for "Phone Call", and now the lead singer launches into some kind of vocal...thing. I can't really explain it. This is one of my favorite songs, focused on a relationship gone wrong. After that, "Symptom Finger" lags a little bit, but is nonetheless not a bad piece of electronica. It's a little too electronic.

At the end, they finally abandon all electronica for the song "Birth", told from the point of view of a baby being born. And now The Faint get to shine as musicians, with the guitarist's supremely catchy riffing upfront where it belongs.

And now, the album's over, and your dance session in front of the mirror comes to a conclusion.

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Tomorrow, I'm going back to work after school, two more hours of severely tedious sorting. I'll be discreetly doing my algebra homework when nobody else is watching, or reading a book when the going's really slow. I'll be listening to all of the CDs in the place and being bored out of my mind.

But I'll still be happy in my minimum wage paradise, because at least I got one good thing out of it.