Bold, theatrical orchestration opens the album – Chris Cole’s first album as Manyfingers in a decade – with a sweeping overture. It’s the first of many twists and turns of style and mood: from the murky percussion-led ‘The Dump Pickers of Rainham’ trawls through the sewers in a fashion reminiscent of JG Thirlwell, to the lightly skipping woodwind and piano that leads the poetically whimsical ‘Erasrev’.
Dirgy brass and big beat swing drums trip and fade, melt and fizz into infinite hues from petulance to nostalgia. Fractured narratives, meditations on death, age and ageing, appropriated texts (spam emails and anything goes) are all in the mix, creating a textured collage that reflects a warped yet uncomfortably familiar image of the world and the human condition.
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