Review: Feeding Fingers - Attend

I was recently contacted and asked to review the newest offering from Feeding Fingers, the Austrian based dark wave band. Attend is the 4th full length album from frontman Justin Curfman, and it's a bold, yet nuanced journey through the dark brooding side of post punk.

The album opens with the creepy Your Candied Laughter Crawls, boasting melodies reminiscent of the great Siouxsie Sioux. The haunting vocals and familiar yet refreshingly modern sounding post-punk are just a taste of what's to come on the rest of the album.

Interspersed throughout the album are short atmospheric tracks, often with unsettling or dramatic soundscapes, promising to take the listener on a journey to another realm of reality. Yet the obtuse and innovative approach to these tracks, bleeds into others such as And Crayon Toxic Twins, which features a canorous cacophony of horns throughout, or Did My Absence Follow Me, which I can only describe as a strange but pleasing amalgamation of The Cure and The Beastie Boys.

While the album boasts robust post-punk tracks like Ashes Displayed in Zoos, A Sleeping Centipede Presence, and Polaroid Papercuts, which are instantly familiar and dancable; the album also features more avant garde and experimental tonalities, such as the Tim Burton-esk Survive Bliss, the fever dream of a jazz track Barbed Wire Threads the Sun, and the twisted acoustic power ballad of doom, Abusive Remains Lubricate Me.

The sheer mastery and ease with which Curfman navigates the breadth of genre is astounding and enthralling. Certainly any musicophile will find something to love here, and no genre fan will find themselves bored or pressing the skip button. Attend is a Tour de Force of virtuosity and sundry craft that is far too rare. Curfman has created something truly wonderful here, and you would be crazy to miss out.

-The Count runs the Cemetery Confessions podcast and The Requiem Podcast. For more info on The Count, click here.