Photo by PETE TROSHAK
The Faint rolled onto stage last night at the Trocadero on a wave of swirling fog and strobe lights. The band started off slow, playing at first in darkness and milking the tension for a few songs before unleashing the main event of the night – an airing of their classic album Danse Macabre. The album is an eminently danceable 35-minute hell-ride through the paranoia, claustrophobia and decay of life as a drone in the big city. As scenes of skyscrapers and animated pixels rolled by on screens behind them, the band brought the album to life in a hail of throbbing bass, black-sheets-of-rain guitar and slammed keyboards. As the band kicked into the album’s opening cut, “Agenda Suicide,” the crowd roared with approval and the club turned into one grooving sweaty mess of smiling bodies. The moment of ultimate tension arrived in the middle of the show with the song “Violent.” Singer Todd Fink introduced the song saying the band wasn’t sure how they were going to recreate this number in concert, but they were up to the task. The song started as a slow, synth-scored catalog of noir-ish crime scenes mapping the city skyline. Three minutes in, all hell broke loose with the band exploding with the sound of unspeakable violence and then everything went quiet save the heartbeat bass pulse of a dying victim for scant seconds. Fink then unleashed a scream as the victim expired, and the song exploded into the sound of a police chase, sirens wailing and trailing off into the night. — PETE TROSHAK