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.
