By: Dan Salter
Tiny Fingers | website | facebook | bandcamp |
Sometimes a record comes along that just grabs you buy the short stuff and demands you pay attention. As soon as the opening bars of the title track of the new album by Tiny Fingers fired up I realised that this was going to be one of those albums; the synth bass veritably throbs with intent and purpose.
By the close of the album I was reduced to stunned reverence and headed straight to their Bandcamp page to discover that they already had four albums under their belts before this one. Four! How had I not come across this band before? It’s a testament to how many amazing bands there are out their, the depth of talent, that a band like this can effectively escape notice.
Tiny Fingers hail from Israel, and this perhaps explains why they have managed to escape our radar for so long but they are very firmly on it now. They play what I can only describe as a hybrid of post rock, prog and techno. This is admittedly not a new phenomenon, it’s long ceased to surprise me the number of folk making post rock that have a background in dance music. Post rock offers the same emotional build and release that techno does, leading to Hannah from Rumour Cubes to once describe post rock as “techno for broken people, people that can’t jump around in a warehouse any more”. However, the way Tiny Fingers blend these two elements is not like the euphoria of Vessels or the off beat experimentation of 65Days but something distinctly darker and far more sinister.
The album kicks of with the title track and sets the tone for what is to come. The synth bass pulses out of the speakers before drums take up the groove before descending in to a maelstrom of percussion and guitar streams. Just as it reaches fever pitch the storm breaks and out of it rolls the deep bass of ‘Eyes Of Gold’. For a moment it is a respite but then disconcerting synth sweeps, like swarms of angry insects, up the sinister level considerably and on we go further in to the deep black hole of Tiny Fingers’ imagination. The virtually seamless transition between tracks means that by the time you’ve got to the deeply claustrophobic twisted dub of ‘Traveller Soul’ it’s already too late to turn back, there is no sight of the way home any more and all there is to do is push on.
‘Deuteronomy’ offers glimpse of a moment of light, a shimmering guitar melody that is soon subsumed by the mighty bass. One of the highlights of the album, the track jumps back an forth gleefully between something that sounds almost like ‘classic prog’ and dirty, dirty techno with massive builds and deep bass drops. Absolutely outstanding.
Next up comes the relatively gentle ‘Drops’ and the absolutely not gentle ‘The Other’, the latter being something to akin to prog having a full frontal collision with a lorry full of drum & bass. Out of the carnage emerges another stand out moment of the record. At only two and a half minutes long it’s one of the shorter tracks on the album but what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in fierce power.
The absolute golden moment of the album though is the sublime ‘Dispatcher’. Even alongside the excellence on offer here this track stands head and shoulders above the rest. Once again it’s all about the wonderful, deep bass, hovering down at the very edge of audibility, at that point where it becomes less of a sound and more of a physical sensation, underpinning an epic post rock-esque guitar part. First time I heard this tune I stuck it straight back on again, and again, and again. It’s one of those.
A lot of music comes across my desk and through my ears as editor of this website so it is very rare when I receive something that genuinely sounds like nothing else I’ve heard before but that is exactly what Tiny Fingers have done with The Fall and it should be treasured. It is unique, it is compelling and it is absolutely fucking magnificent.
