Record Review: Fink - "Distance and Time"

Rating: 6.0 / 10.0

"Hey There Delilah" has made me immediately suspicious of anyone who picks up an acoustic guitar and purports to wear his heart on his sleeve. I don't know why that particular song did it, but there it is. It's just that whenever I listen to that song, I feel like I know why it was written, and it sure as hell wasn't as a heartsick apostrophe to Delilah to try and somehow relate what she does to him. It was a trap, it was the ballad on the record that would make every girl who listened to it weak in the knees. It was Tom Higgenson's play at sex appeal. I don't hate it just because it worked so well (I'm probably a little jealous despite the fact that "Hey There Delilah" is a turd of a song, but there's no hate), I hate it because whenever I hear that damned song, I feel like that bastard Higgenson pulled a fast one. Now I can't fault him for having written a hit, genuine or not. But I can be bitter about the attitude he's spawned in me - the inherent and immediate mistrust of anyone in the business of writing slow, heartfelt, acoustic numbers. And I am. Very bitter.

So I cringed at the prospect of listening to Fink's (aka Fin Greenall) latest record. But any fears I had of disingenuousness were quickly dispelled. It's an very honest record, honest and uncreative. Of course, uncreative is not entirely a bad thing, there is a definite formula here from which Greenall does not deviate...ever. As a result, the record as a whole is quite a drag. The individual songs are nice enough, but the whole record does not amount to much more than background music. There is not enough nuance or subtlety in Greenall's music for the songs to sustain themselves, they are begging to be fleshed out by clever arrangements. So I suppose this record's honesty and commitment to truth is its tragic flaw. This record would have benefitted from another run through the production mill.

That said, there are no tracks that standout as bad, or even substantially weaker than the rest. It's a consistently good album. Just good - never more, never less. That is something of an achievement in itself. Greenall is a competent songwriter, not a great one. He needs to turn his eye to arrangement and production, expand his ear a little bit, and he might be able to do something very special.


-PTC