Revisit of the Week: Faunts - Ostalgia Vol. 1 (2016)
(I know I haven't really kept up with my revisits of the week this year due to life reasons, nor have I kept up with writing about them, but let's try and change that... !)
Canada's Faunts deserve a longer discography: despite having been active since the mid-2000s, you barely need to lift your second hand's fingers to count the number of releases they've got under their belt. You'd have thought that a band who were given an exceptional amount of unexpected promo would have retained some wind under their sails: 2007's Mass Effect used their song "M4 Part II" to a phenomenal impact as the ending credits music, while 2012's Mass Effect 3 repeated the trick with "Das Malefitz" to admittedly less exciting results (good song but not a trilogy-ending epic credits roll soundtrack). But instead, after 2009's second album Feel.Love.Thinking.Of the band have barely moved. The ME3 hype train was timed with the release of 2012's Left Here Alone EP but that was a selection of formerly shelved songs brought back to life; after that, it took four years for the next release to come out. And that was technically one song, and today's subject.
2016's Ostalgia Vol. 1 is billed as an EP but is really just a very meaty single. What you have here is a single piece of music, a 17-minute song called "Thirty-Three" which is offered both as a single long suite as intended, as well having been split into five parts for easier playlisting I suppose. As the name hints, there's a sense of throwback to the whole ordeal - stylistically this harkens back to the earliest Faunts material in its sweeping ambientronica/post-rock soundscape, it was recorded using old technology and even the name nods towards the debut album's stand-out track "Twenty-Three", decade later. That all sounds interesting and there absolutely was still potential left unmined in the band's early sound, but whether I break it into parts or listen to it as one colossal piece, "Twenty-Three" slips through my fingers. Its seventeen minutes are spent with beautiful sonic touches, lush production and dreamy soundscapes with plenty of Steven Batke's ethereally wistful vocals, but the band can't seem to find anything interesting to build out of these standard elements of their sound. Whilst the song is broken into slightly different sections to give it a semblance of development and evolution, I'd be hard-pressed to tell what happens at any given part - and I've been listening to this since 2016 and all this week, usually twice in a row as I go through both variants of it in a row! "Twenty-Three" barely causes a ripple, which is equal parts baffling and disappointing: given their prior track record, a long-form mood piece that ebbs and flows to a grand finale sounds like a surefire way to success. They just forgot colour it in this time.
Ostalgia Vol. 1 was meant to be the first of a six-volume series; in 2026, we're still waiting for the remaining five volumes. Faunts themselves have largely disappeared, with the last sign of life being a random single in 2019 which came and went. Some of their side projects have activated in the meantime and it's unclear whether the band is anyone's going concern anymore. Maybe none of the other Ostalgias ever happened because the band simply couldn't find the inspiration to follow it, and the somewhat flat first volume would seem to be an indication of it. If this is the end for Faunts, it's a really sorry one - this in theory showcases everything I love the band for, but with none of the depth, feeling or grip.