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The Finger

I Don't Believe My Eyes

Written by: TL on 07/08/2012 23:48:07

For my next review, I am going to need to start by apologising for what is about to follow. What I am about to write is more blunt than gentle, and likely not very constructive at all. All I can say is, I'm sorry, it is not personal. I have been tasked with reviewing "I Don't Believe My Eyes", the debut album from Greek, female-fronted rock quintet The Finger and to make a long story very short, I think it's bad. And what's worse is I don't think it's controversial-makes-entire-music-scene-cry-out-in-uproar bad - it's not The Bunny The Bear type of bad - it's not that bad - in fact it's better, yet somehow worse, because it is the type of record you feel like you can sum up with the word all artists likely fear the most: "I Don't Believe My Eyes" is mindnumbingly, painstakingly boring.

A review has to paint a picture of what a band sounds like though, so I feel obliged to report that I think The Finger sound a bit like what I'd imagine the result would be, if you took bands like Placebo or White Lies and took out all the things about them which are really cool and replaced them with.. well nothing really. The songs here trudge along at a pedestrian mid-tempo, with simplistic bass lines, predictable electric chord progressions and cold, depressing piano melodies setting a bleak, uninteresting soundscape. On top we have the female singer, who I think is going for a sort of detached indie coolness with her delivery, yet manages to only sound either like she would rather be doing anything else but singing, or like she's fresh out of highschool and wants to use her new rock band as a way to stick it to whichever old classmates she didn't get along with.

I mean come on! The most spectacular song on the album is "Die! Die! Superhero!" and the reason it's spectacular is because it's lyrics are flat out awful. "Somebody whispers, somebody screaming, I give the finger, and I don't listen", or how about "Die! Die! Motherfucker! Cry! Cry! In your laughter! Goodbye! We will miss you!". Even if we forget for a moment that nobody in their right mind would think it cool to use such rethoric without some preposterous sarcasm involved, can I just point out that the rhyming here sounds like something a kindergartener could come up with?

The Finger, in my humble opinion, sounds like a band that has somehow been living under a rock to only recently claw their way into the modern world, stumbling upon indie rock and deciding to try to make some themselves before having any sort of sophisticated notion about the dos and don'ts of music today. I will grant the reader that maybe there's some sort of cultural gap or joke in play here that I fail to account for, and it really isn't because I take personal joy in picking on small bands - I just can't help but think that The Finger sounds to me like the type of band that only plays tiny shows with only friends and family in the audience, and unless they do something miraculous to their aesthetic, I don't see them going anywhere at all. Sorry.

Download: Die! Die! Superhero!
For The Fans Of: Placebo, I Like Trains, The National, White Lies
Listen: facebook.com/thefingerband

Release Date 15.03.2012
Self-released