Faith’s stillness is tranquillised fatalism, not depression or PTSD

Evidence

Yet Faith would have benefited from pursuing its emotional monotone even more assiduously, if what adrenaline that remained had been drained away, and the two up-tempo tracks (“Primary” and “Doubt”) had been excised. On all the other tracks, Faith flatlines pop, bringing it as close to complete stillness as it is possible to be without coming to the grinding halt the group had sang of in an earlier, much more fleet-of-foot incarnation. There was no calmness in Faith’s stillness. It is not tranquil, but tranquillised, downer-heavy; not so much oceanic as waterlogged, swamped. (In fact, Faith was recorded on coke, not tranquillisers.) The album seems to come from another planet where gravity is more powerful. The synthesizers, now foregrounded more than ever, do most to produce this effect of viscous heaviness. They have a cold warmth that fills out the sound like valium entering the bloodstream. With Faith, as with downers, it is as if the edge has been taken off. Its world is without angles, a fug, fog of bleary drear. It lacks the clinical quality of Joy Division; this is not the sound of depression, nor (as with Movement) of post-traumatic stress, but of a kind of total fatalism, in which nothing much matters, where “all cats are grey”. Faith finds a strange exhilaration in yielding all hope, in playing dead while going through the zombie motions, “breathing like the drowning man”. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1061

Categorization

• DEFINE: Useful distinction: clinical depression (Joy Division), post-traumatic stress (Movement), and total fatalism (Faith) as three distinct affective registers.
• XREF: connects to: Faith can become a pain rather than a source of comfort. — Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, 194; Faith offers existential meaning that transcends suffering and death. — Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, 130; Religion both causes existential anxiety and soothes it (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Faith is a cultivated disposition, not a guarantee of God’s existence. #complicates (0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 439
• Faith offers existential meaning that transcends suffering and death. #complicates (0.72) — Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, 130
• Religion both causes existential anxiety and soothes it #complicates (0.72)
• Faith can become a pain rather than a source of comfort. #complicates (0.70) — Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, 194