Hauntingly beautiful and defiantly hopeful, Faunts create perfect music for the twilight hour between wake and sleep. High Expectations/Low Results, their remarkably assured debut album, and M4, their more recent EP, weave together shimmering walls of pink noise with dreamy, languorous guitar, gently-treated vocals, and swimmingly beautiful melodies.
Faunts was formed in the fall of 2000 by brothers Tim and Steven Batke and soon after, Paul Arnusch. At this point the band emerged, squinting, into the nightlight of their hometown of Edmonton, a modest-sized city in northern Canada with a healthy and thriving music scene. Not long after their inception, Faunts shared the stage with prominent Canadian bands Broken Social Scene, Stars, and Do Make Say Think. Two Canadian tours followed shortly thereafter including a show at the Popmontreal festival. Now with the addition of a third brother, Rob Batke, Faunts are heading to the West Coast for the first time ever for a short string of shows.
Steven’s guitar is at the core of Faunts’ sprawling, ethereal sound, and Tim and Joel’s keyboards add layer upon layer to the music – which makes it all the more powerful when the wall of sound drops away, leaving nothing but a sparkling echo. This is headphone music at its finest – the band is comprised of musical perfectionists, and they can most often be found in the studio tweaking, recording and mixing until each song is sculpted perfectly to define a specific mood.
Press Quotes:
[Faunts are] “driving along the same star-lit road as The Smiths’ “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out,” but these love-sick passengers are lucky enough not to get hit head-on by that double-decker bus” – Fluxblog“Gorgeous, lush shoe-gazey indie rock…very pleasurable” – Music For Robots
“Despite the self-deprecating title, High Expectations/Low Results is an amazingly ambitious and expansive album, garnering the group comparisons to the likes of Sigur Ros and the Cure. While the record’s sound is completely Edmonton – cold, sparse, yet comforting – it’s hard to believe that the band’s combination of ambient guitar, soft drums and ethereal keys was born here rather than Montreal or Toronto” – Vue Weekly
FAUNTS
7/30/08 – Portland, OR @ Holocene (w/ Titus Andronicus)
8/01/08 – Vancouver, BC @ the Sweatshop
8/03/08 – Seattle, WA @ Sunset Tavern
8/05/08 – San Francisco, CA @ 12 Galaxies
8/06/08 – Los Angeles, CA @ Silverlake Lounge
FAUNTS LINKS:
MySpace: www.myspace.com/faunts
Band page: www.faunts.com
Press materials:friendlyfirerecordings.com/faunts.html