At first it's hard to know how seriously to take The Faint. They look like they are re-enacting an episode of The Tube from 1981 and have the kind of song titles - Cars Pass In Cold Blood, Ballad of a Paralysed Citizen - not witnessed since Ultravox hung up their overcoats. If they came from London or New York you would suspect them of being smirking ironists but in fact their home is Omaha, Nebraska, not a town famed for its love of smirking irony.

The Faint's complete sincerity is their trump card. Electroclash was a creative dead end because of its self-conscious blankness, which stripped synth-pop of all its preposterous excess and, thus, most of its appeal. The Faint take similar influences and sink their teeth into them. Pale-faced, black-shirted frontman Todd Baechle has a wide repertoire of angsty theatrics. He stares broodily at his feet during the quiet bits, hurls himself into the kind of jerky contortions made famous by Joy Division's Ian Curtis in the loud bits and, at key moments, dramatically clutches his head as if the pain of living in a dehumanising, mechanised society has become too much.

So much of what The Faint do could add up to a retro joke, were they not so brutally visceral. Rarely have synthesizers been made to rock so hard, delivering savage hooks and great filthy wodges of noise. It's not the guitarist who holds the eye but the keyboardist, legs splayed and staring madly at his instrument as if he's about to either trash it or mount it. If anybody could get away with bringing back those guitar-shaped keyboards that disappeared around the same time as the Berlin Wall, it is this man.

And if a Gary Numan sample can get to number one with help from the Sugababes, it's not inconceivable to imagine one of these furiously infectious songs gracing Top of the Pops. Agenda Suicide and Glass Danse make you wonder why nobody's tried to weld Duran Duran-sized choruses to Joy Division-inspired death disco before now. The measure of The Faint's appeal, though, is that in the midst of one of their synth-abusing techno-punk assaults, spotting all the reference points seems dry and irrelevant. Better just to dance.