Fingathing - 'Superhero Music' (Grand Central)
3/5
By: Toby L
If someone threw 'neo-classical-hip-hop' at you as a potential musical-genre, you'd most likely laugh. Unless it was Fingathing.
As, essentially, Fingathing, who possess 36 collaborators in total, just won't stop until they drum home the point of their dynamic decks 'n' strings approach being something rather unique - so much so, that they include over twenty tracks on their second LP, 'Superhero Music'. Admittedly, to say that such a collection of sweaty, albeit refined, anthems is excessive, occasionally repetitive indeed, would be true, but to deny its originality and occasional quirky charm would be the same as refusing the face of quality itself.
From the outset, though, you'd be forgiven for the assumption that it's just a Gorillaz cash-in; colourful cartoons flood the sleeve-artwork and the general presentation is that of jovial shenanigans - though this is fitting, for, much like The Avalanches, Fingathing supplement their urban grooves with dashings upon dashings of carefully-selected sound-bites and snippets not entirely of the norm (take, for instance, the comedic voice-samples as demonstrated in 'Bad Gameshow Host').
But it's not all fun and games, because every record has its mildly varying-points, and for 'Superhero...', these occur within the double-bass laden 'Intro' and Peter Parker's 'Ogre', where haunting instruments are soon exchanged for continually tappy cymbals and a plethora of vinyl-scratching. Better still, though, is the strut-inducing funkiness of 'Scrap' or the guitar-drenched charm of 'Haze' (if only because the latter proves the cutting-edge genius of implementing specially-placed horse-noises with music).
Consequentially, on occasion amusing and often rather ambient within its mood-setting - as in closer 'Epitaph' - Fingathing's second full-length outing is basically twenty-two glimpses into the perplexing lifestyles of one of the UK's most criminally-overlooked ensembles, whose versatility may be somewhat lacking - yet whose focus and character is distinctly soaring... It's fair to say that even Batman or Spiderman would find it tough to resist busting a move when playing 'Superhero Music' to themselves.
Artists in this article: Fingathing
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