The Faintest Ideas - 2013 - This Is How Fast You Go

Jigsaw Records – PZL036

 This Is How Fast You Go is less a conventional album than the debris trail left by a band moving too quickly to preserve itself in orderly chapters. It gathers The Faintest Ideas’ singles and compilation appearances, then adds an abandoned single, recordings from the group’s final period, a substantial radio session and an early demo made before the lineup had fully settled. Thirty-seven tracks might suggest an exhaustive monument, but the music resists anything so dignified. Most songs are finished within two minutes, propelled by bright guitar abrasion, drums that seem determined to arrive before the melody, and vocals balancing emotional exposure against the useful protection of shouting. The collection does not slow the band down for historical inspection. It lets their history rush past at its original speed.

The opening run makes brevity feel less like minimalism than appetite. “I’ll Wear the Crown,” “Physically I Was at My Lowest,” “Don’t Pick Up the Phone” and “Pay for Crumbs” carry titles large enough to support entire dramatic narratives, yet the songs reduce those narratives to their most electrically useful moments. A riff, a complaint, a hook and a sudden exit are often enough. “If I Could Write Spiteful Lyrics” exposes the tension operating beneath much of the band’s work: the words may gesture toward bitterness, humiliation or disappointment, but the music keeps converting private defeat into collective motion. Even “Procrastination of Everyday Tasks” moves with terrific urgency. The Faintest Ideas understood that sadness does not always produce slow music. Sometimes it creates an impatient need to communicate before hesitation, good taste or self-consciousness can interfere.

Three consecutive covers briefly reveal the width of the band’s private listening map. Skeeter Davis’s country-pop heartbreak, Swedish punk band Pizzoar’s “År 3000” and Depeche Mode’s “A Question of Lust” appear beside one another without requiring an explanation or a theory of genre. Their coexistence makes sense because The Faintest Ideas were never defined by a narrow collection of approved influences. They responded to songs that could survive being pulled into their own rattling, economical language. The title track from What Goes Up Must Calm Down then reappears among later singles and unreleased material, but outside its original album it feels like one piece of a much larger correspondence conducted through tiny records, compilation invitations and recordings that might otherwise have remained scattered across private collections.

“I Wanna Be a Part of Something Small” could serve as the collection’s manifesto. Smallness here does not mean timidity or reduced ambition. It means the intimate scale at which independent music once traveled: a seven-inch record, a copied compilation, a radio broadcast caught by somebody who knew when to press record, or a song discovered because one distant listener cared enough to send it somewhere else. “The Barricades Became My Home,” “Picnic in Panic,” “Eyes Like UFOs” and “Full Fledged Joy” sound like fragments of a social world in which humor, frustration and belonging remain tangled together. The titles are funny because life is ridiculous, but the comedy never cancels the need beneath it. These songs want connection while distrusting nearly every grand institution that claims to provide it.

The ten-song radio session near the end offers a second photograph of familiar material. Without replacing the earlier versions, it shows how songs this compact can remain alive through differences in attack, balance and immediate group energy. Repetition within an archival collection becomes useful rather than redundant: hearing “Ready to Fall,” “Donkey Love” or “Let the Party Go On” twice reveals that the song is not identical to its original recording. It is a small structure the musicians can enter again and disturb from within. The closing untitled demo travels still farther backward, reaching the group before its identity had completely formed. Ending there reverses the usual retrospective path. Instead of finishing with dissolution, This Is How Fast You Go leaves the band at the instant of possibility, when a few people have begun making a noise together but do not yet know how much life they will compress inside it.