The Faint - Desperate Guys

The Faint are a weird mix of the last few decades of Americana. They use eighties synth sounds on top of nineties industrial rhythms and some attitude that reeks of modern-day, middle-American humour, like South Park.

This latest single sounds like them, certainly, but they’ve made some mad improvements, branching out. It’s much more organic sounding; the big beat of the drums sounds live, the bass is fluid rather than sounding like it’s been run through a sampler ten times and there are string-blasts of the type that crop-up in chart R’n’B tunes.

But it stills sounds like them. They arrived at a time full of interest in the things that were happening twenty years ago – their stuff sounds like it could easily fit onto the Grand Theft Auto:Vice City soundtrack. It’s like Fischerspooner and Chromeo – stuff that comes from what Prince and the Pet Shop Boys were doing, but run through the impossible-to-avoid filter of everything else that has gone through popular culture since. So what you get is a weird mix of yuppie sounds with slacker attitudes and cyber-goth looks.

The Faint are ace – there’s something more down-to-earth about them whereas the likes of Fischerspooner fall into Sigue Sigue Sputnik territory. This tune is ace – all their pervy humour wrapped up in a simple, danceable track. And the remix on the B-side is ace too – it gives the A-side a real Beverly Hills Cop feel, all funk rhythms and synth-bass. Way better than the fucking Crazy Frog.