CHARM OF FINCHES
Marlinchen In The Snow (Spunk)
SUBTLETY IN YOUR ART? Nice in theory; problematic in practice. Ask Charm Of Finches.
Make continual small changes and additions, enhance and improve by getting better at your core skills and pushing a little further each time, beyond the boundaries that supposedly define you or your style, and you’ll get a nod of approval from people paying close attention. Which is nice.
But that ain’t nothing like the vocal response and awed respect that comes with the big splash additions or the ballyhooed change in direction. Go solo; go electronic; go country; bring in a collaborator from some on-trend alternative act; declare yourself God; do them all at the same time.
Which is why the Finches sisters, Mabel and Ivy Windred-Wornes, have a problem: they keep getting better without shouting, in a world where shouting seemingly is demanded.
This is album number four, and like its predecessors it reflects a further deepening in the lyrics, which brings more heft to their personal tales (of misjudged relationships; of absence, discovery, and travel) and more solidity to their flights of imagination (not least the title track, inspired by a favourite Brothers Grimm tale from childhood), while rooting them in a contemporary understanding (feminism is a given; recalcitrance not unexpected).
They continue expanding the stylistic influences: showing greater confidence in pop, more variations in a kind of Gothic folk that you might once have thought as their default setting, and a not to be sneezed at facility for elevating the merely pretty to the quite beautiful. And while the arrangements and sound of this album, made with Canadian Daniel Ledwell in Nova Scotia, play with space and separation as easily as they approach instrumentation beyond voice/guitar/keyboards, where once they may have been tempted to effectively point flashing arrows at these elements, these all serve as supporting players not the point of any particular song.
Take the backward looping and intimations of spectral children (or attic lunacy) towards the end of In The Dark, which remain connected to the earlier cello and banked voices, and the hanging space of Human that contains echoes in emptiness around its declaration that “It’s not my job to teach you how to be a human, man”, but tendrils of sound offer something tangible to grip that balance it all.
Or how Middle Of Your Mess glistens like moonlight on a dark pond and brings voices in swooping intersections, yet holds not just the steady tempo, like being rowed across that pond, but a sense of control in its depiction of rivalry (“I can’t help but feel a little out of place/She wants you, I want her out of my face”) that threatens “wrack and ruin” but, you suspect, not for all parties.
The album opens with the quite punchy rhythmic pulse of Clean Cut, like mid-period Cure, with electric guitar gliding through thin gaps and drums backfilling those gaps, while the merged voices take and retake shape. There isn’t anything obviously “pop” about this track, with even the chorus switching its lights on late, but it completes its insinuation so effectively that you come away from it certain that you have just been seduced while looking the other way.
Likewise, Leave It All Behind, with its fingerpicking guitar and almost reclining vocals, its imagery of childhood familiars and adult expectation of discomforts, presents as rustic folk. However, there is an alluring pull in the voices, the faint e-bow-like guitar and cello, and the mixed appeal of home and far-from-home, that catches and holds you. So much so that it is almost a wrench when the song ends.
Marlinchen In The Snow is a record of continued evolution, which doesn’t sound sexy as a marketing tool, and the accretion of small moves, which doesn’t sound like insurgency. But it is lush when it needs to be, poetic when it should be, and compelling when it wants to be, and those are subtle victories that arrive at something quite grand really.
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