I’ve followed Fink since his 2006 ‘Biscuits for Breakfast’ album and I have fallen deeper in love with his music and his voice with each following release. Fin Greenall is truly blessed with the type of smoky and seductive yet gravelly, weather worn tone that would make a shopping or To-Do list sound like a Shakespearean sonnet and a live concert feel like a personal serenade.
For ‘Horizontallism’, Fink (the trio of Fin Greenall, Tim Thornton and Guy Whittaker) have harvested the best dubs from last year’s ‘Hard Believer’ album then reworked these to create a powerful, synth heavy, sonic experience of stolen moments, industrial snapshots and dislodged memories – each vivid in their representation and impressive in their reach.
A clutch of instrumental reveries evocative of long drives, chugging train journeys along kilometers of unlit tracks, of surreptitious deals made in dark corners and of rendezvous in secret locations are as psychotropic as they are psychedelic. Take Pilgrim (Moda232) with its scratchy strings and insistent beats, ringing tills and tripping tablas or ‘Green and The Blue (RLP12-321)’ with its Hendrix sustained electric guitar and ghostly strings. At the same time they are the type of tracks that make you watch the smoke curl and heads nod, that make you swoop, then swim and dive, that make you kiss and never want to come up for air. ‘Looking Too Closely (So36)’ is powered by a heart beat, crashing cymbals, a spiky tension and an undulating bass the sum of which courses like annotated biood through your arteries straight into your brain. ‘Shakespeare (Nachbarn39)’ is a sweeter, sustained strings and pianos affair, whilst A30 Breakdown’s swishing ‘motorway drive-by in torrential rain’ loop invites you to fall into the desolate, ambient vortex in your headphones as you imagine resigning yourself to a soaking wet wait on the roadside for the recovery vehicle that never comes. ‘White Flag’ is the ultimate submission, its warbling synths, skanking drums and dub echo-ing incidentals accompany you to the cloakroom in your head and on to that first metro or bus after sunrise or on your long walk (of shame) home because that’s exactly what Fink’s little electronic rabbit holes are for.
Vocally ‘Fall Into The Light’ is a perfect sunset tune – it’s intimate, open and honest yet bristling with ‘will we or won’t we’ anticipation whilst ‘Suffering In The Art Of Love’ is the folk soul Fin in full flight with his voice, his guitar and band laid bare. Take him as he is. Or not at all. ‘Hard Believer’ leads you into an aural wind tunnel with Fin’s plaintive hum, reversed ethereal voices, foot stamps, wet and heavy kicks, slappy handclaps and then the lead vocal – which unfurls like cigar smoke then pours thick and clear like a fine cognac.
For its artistic direction, ‘Horizontalism’ draws heavily on Fin’s relocation to Berlin and the sights, sounds and experiences that have influenced his music in that time. He, together with his band, has created an album of ambient folk and synth infused electronica that is as scenic and striking as a soundtrack yet as secret and personal as an open journal in an old friend’s living room: surprisingly sensual and sensorially loose whilst also being technically tight-shut. A raw diamond.
5 out of 5
Reviewed by Paulette
