Apart from spilling a drink all over your pants or having your glasses brushed off and broken by the errant foot of a crowd surfer, having to stand through a horrible opening act can be one of the biggest buzz killers in the whole rock 'n’ roll game. With this in mind, it’s a small miracle that fans who packed the Opera House for The Faint were able to escape satisfied after they were mistreated by not one but two disappointing openers.
Philadelphia’s Genghis Tron are a metal band who opt for a drum machine over live drums and bass, producing a type of electro-metal that’s heavy on the synth and light on entertainment. Consequently, the deep, guttural roar of Mookie Singerman seems slightly out of place without the head-banging thrash of a backing band.
Yet Genghis Tron seem only mildly mediocre when compared to the absolute train-wreck that is Jaguar Love, a new project born out of the ashes of two defunct Seattle art-punk bands, The Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves. Aside from some clever keyboard vamping by Jessie Nelson that occasionally managed to produce something melodic, Jaguar Love’s classic-rock-influenced songs are so overloaded with earworm playground hooks that they come off as nothing but trite and lazy. It’s also somewhat hard to fathom that singer Johnny Whitney has established such an enduring career, given that his singing voice vaguely resembles the kind of noise Alvin the Chipmunk would emit under extreme duress — the kind of duress that presumably only comes when he’s being ripped apart by a larger animal in the middle of the night. If his voice wasn’t bad enough, his affected stage banter was truly horrifying — dude sounded like Little Richard meets Liza Minnelli, with two times the inanity.
After such an objectionable display, it would have taken a near-hurricane to shake the crowd out of its collective doldrums. It was a tall order, but The Faint weren’t about to back down from the challenge. Not that they succeeded immediately — it took about five or six of their trademark dance-punk numbers before the Omaha, Nebraska five-piece whipped the stunned audience into a frenzy. The catalyst was “Birth,” the urgent closer off 2004’s Wet from Birth. Guitarist Dapose shredded over the driving beat while singer Todd Fink, clad in a button-down white lab coat and old-school pilot goggles, flailed his arms wildly as if the world was coming to an end.
Fink has always fancied himself a prophet of society’s impending doom, and judging by The Faint’s live performance, his message can be summed up thusly: if this really is the apocalypse, we might as well get our dance on.
The flood gates were open, and the floor was braced for a relentless assault of barn-burners that kept the crowd’s enthusiasm on an upward trajectory, climaxing with the double-header of 2004 single “I Disappear” and the celebutard hate-on “Get Seduced.”
Alternating at a frenetic pace between old favourites and tracks off their latest disc Fasciinatiion, the break before the encore was welcomed — it gave the sweating masses a few minutes to catch their breath before the band launched into “Paranoiattack” and new fear-mongering single “The Geeks Were Right.”
While The Faint’s songs have a distinct feel on record, their live show is comprised of such a plethora of bangin’ tunes that the nuances inevitably get lost in the mix, coming together to form one endless jam. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing — when I casually turned to the girl who’d been dancing next to me to inquire about the name of the final song, she responded, “Fuck man, I forget — they all blend into one. But when everybody’s dancing like that, the song title doesn’t really matter, does it?”