Album Review: Tiny Fingers – Megafauna
Alejandro De Luna
Review originally published for Gigslutz
★★★
Avalanches of noise combined with fat and nasty guitar riffs; endless drum beats overlapped with obscene bass lines; bitter keyboards and the mute howl of inexistent vocals that enhance the mammoth sound, in a collection of nine pieces that claim for nothing rather than a feeling of being involved in some kind of bloodstained ritual, with a conquer-esque satanic intention. These bearded men that sound like if they just came out from an obscure sect call themselves Tiny Fingers, and if they are not full of hatred and resentment, certainly their music speaks for them.
As soon as you listen to ‘Intro’, you know that Megafauna – Tiny Fingers third LP, but the first that fully leaves the troubled borders of their hometown in Israel – will compromise your inner peace, but it’s with ‘Demands’ where the reminiscences to warfare, sirens, chaos, extermination and desolation become so obscene and direct that they grab your full attention.
The massive noise in ‘The Reduction Wheel’ proves that these barbarian and bearded men are not simply playing around. Their taste for shaping a tremendous sound full of apocalyptic filthiness, fire and cities falling down, transit violently between the outrage and pretension of progressive music and metal-like riffs. It is like being in some kind of prophetic mayhem where barbarians destroy everything that steps in their way – the kind of music that your geeky friend will enjoy, while comfortably assassinating people in a shitty video game. If you doubt it, just listen to ‘Preloader’ or ‘Money Time.’
After the slaughter in the previous tracks, war aftermath and devastation enters with ‘Cyclamens’, a progressive and a not-so-full-of-hope ode full of creepy textures that evokes a city in ruins and that claims for a bit of peace. But if there was an intention to stop the pandemonium, ‘El Dorados’ brings back the homicidal atmosphere of desperation with their spooky riffs and unpromising futuristic panorama.
Name it prog rock, psychedelia, metal, “warfare music” or the most violent version of Mars Volta´s alumni, but Tiny Fingers has an impressive ability to evoke destructive passages that are morbidly satisfying. Does the political situations of Tel Aviv and Gaza influence this collection of sonic bloodshed and violence? Is this is a political move against the savage colonisation of their country?
Just forty-five minutes of barbaric, and yes – a bit pretentious, odes of epic combat-like music that will bang your skull while your parents tell you to turn that shit off. Recommendable.
Megafauna is out now via Anova Music.
