Hide Before Dinner

The debut vinyl release by Australian trio F ingers (formerly known as Fingers Pty Ltd) is a sparse, haunting album of ethereal darkwave folk, marked by shadowy vocals buried under fluid layers of acoustic guitar, bass guitar, and synthesizer. The album feels calmly detached, flowing like an icy stream through a grey haze. Songs like "Mum's Caress After Trip" contain lost schoolgirl melodies playing around in the dark with spacious guitar notes. The record's most abstract piece, "Tantrum Time," distorts Carla dal Forno's already indecipherable vocals beyond recognition, masking them with throbbing effects and wringing the rest of the song's minimal accompaniment through a similarly fluctuating filter. "Blissfull Cubby House" is a light enough diversion, with bubbly keyboards and a gentle layer of tape hiss, and "Useless Treasure" is even more bubbly and playful, but "Under the House Hard to Breathe" sounds appropriately suffocating and terrified. Mesmerizing and ominous, Hide Before Dinner is one of the better under-the-radar releases of 2015. ~ Paul Simpson