At their peak, the Faint really were a band worthy of fascination. Formerly a sleepy Omaha indie-rock group, the Faint reinvented themselves with 1999's Blank-Wave Arcade and 2001's Danse Macabre, prefiguring the new-wave/electro revivals of the '00s. More importantly, they scored two albums' worth of superlative Ballardian pop songs, combining sex and death drives (three songs on Blank-Wave Arcade have "sex" in their titles, another is called "Cars Pass in Cold Blood"; "suicide," "death," and "violent" all make titular appearances on Danse Macabre) with surprisingly pleasant results.

Now in their 13th (!) year, the band have separated from longtime label Saddle Creek to release their follow-up to 2004's flop Wet from Birth (insert abortion jokes here). And while they're still tinkering with all the right high-end sonic toys, the band have clearly long lost the lyrical plots that once made their gothic synth-pop so seductive.

Instead, the band indulge in trite recriminations of tabloid celebrity culture ("Get Seduced"), vague and ironically Luddite environmentalism ("The Geeks Were Right"), weak character study ("Psycho"), and heavenward-gazing hand-wringing about the endless war ("A Battle Hymn for Children"). "Fish in a Womb" is a fine ballad with a frail melody and squelchy, fluid bass, but its amniotic theme seems left over from the last album. "Forever Growing Centipedes" is a rousing enough dance number, but it's lyrically inscrutable. Not that the Faint's every album has to cohere thematically, but here they just seem entirely lost.

Their once pitch-perfect new-wave resuscitation now feels cold, and not just because their prescient moment has passed. Singer Todd Fink's increasing tendency toward robotic rapping doesn't help, and worse still is a persistently overbearing synth that seems stuck on "fart" mode. But the main problem is one of clutter and commotion. Where once their albums were decorated with a well-placed economy of electronic bells and whistles, now all the right elements—a chorus here, a melody there—wander about lost, as in an overcrowded house party, missing each other in room after room. The extra "I"s in Fasciinatiion could stand for "I wish it was 2001 again" and "It's not."