This third full-length offering from Dead Finks finds the rootlessly recalcitrant rockers several winters into their Berlin years and fittingly warped by it. Their last record, “The Death & Resurrection Of Johnathan Cowboy” was patched in from the wet hot Sydney practice rooms of their previous pitstop, while “Eve of Ascension” sees the group - founded and maintained by New Zealanders Joseph Thomas and Erin Violet - pull two new members from the local underground to plumb darker depths, eight cold eyes to the steel grey sky. The Finks Method endures, paying big dividends to swivel-eyed shareholders in one loud hail of thick and grungified Swell Mapsian strangeness. Antipodeans let loose on the death strip: some terse, sinewy riffs suggest Hüsker Dü or Superchunk tweaking through a Berlin winter. Other lighter moments recall anxious echoes of the Dunedin sound poking for too long at the wrong hole: electrocuted but still smiling.
“Eve of Ascension” is a prelapsarian nine-track survey of suffering shot through with anxious belligerence. Thomas’ paranoid chants ring out with sputtering non-defeat, woozy caterwauling harmonies go toe-to-toe against insistently sclerotic drumming. Lyrics guide us down nightmare alleys: preoccupied with botched surgery: from sliced eyes to the evil needle, songs calmly count the exploitable products of the earth: ash and oil, human body parts in bags, via intricately caustic post-punk paeans to jumpy stumps and spineless piss-pigs. Dead Finks continue to excel in narrating the uncanny not-yet, stuck in our black night of now, right before the moment of something glorious, or something much, much worse.
Whatever is coming, it might just change everything
- Bryony Beynon
