Principal Fingathing members Peter Parker and Sneaky aren't content with concept albums. They're going for a cohesively conceptualized oeuvre: a pulpy sci-fi epic serialized to music. The latest Fingathing LP picks up where they left off in the most literal sense imaginable: Not only does it continue to fine tune and flesh out their glitchy astral-funk, it resumes the intergalactic adventure yarn that's been unfolding over the course of their entire career.
After faking their deaths at the end of their last record, our heroes are racing through space in metal coffins on a collision course with the sun. Of course, en route to their true demise, Parker and Sneak slip through a rift in the space-time continuum (in the genre of sci-fi that Fingathing pay lip service to, space and time seem to rend as easily and frequently as cheap nylons) and wind up in The Red Nebula. And that's just in the first track, "Walk in Space". With the homage to the Star Wars cantina band on its cover, its unabashedly kitschy geek-chic concept, and its blend of twitchy IDM, instrumental hip-hop, and gaudy sound effects, Fingathing and the Big Red Nebula Band seem born for anime kids, suburban B-boys, and Adult Swim message boarders. It's funk as a musical metaphor for escapist fantasy, rather than for sex.
Not that the concept is so distinctly discernible from the songs. I'm not sure how one would glean that the bombastic, vocoded club cut "Walk in Space", which plays like a crunk M83, has anything to do with space coffins and inter-dimensional travel without access to the album's press release. Besides some diced up one-liners like "walk in space" and "it looks great up here" that serve more as rhythmic fodder than narrative devices, there's no inkling of the storyline.
Except that once you know, it's a soundtrack for careening through space, which you might figure out by diligently studying the mural in the liner notes with pictures illustrating the action each track represents, the concept dovetails so seamlessly with the music that it seems plain as day. As "Walk in Space" shucks and jives through sinuous keyboard lines, syncopated drums, sweeping synthetic strings, and elastic bass, hairpin-turning on picturesque breakbeats, one can vividly imagine peering though a porthole as the cosmos rockets by, exploding with supernovas, seething with varicolored vapors, whirling with galaxies.
The pattern holds for the remainder of the album: The concept is imperceptible from the songs, yet makes intuitive sense regarding them when you're aware of it. "Reanimo", in which a giant robot of the same name frees Fingathing from their coffins, is a grimy, minimal bounce track of Neptunes-baiting electro soul with shifting permutations of snap and drone. The shambling "Open a Door" is less rigid than the preceding tracks: 90 seconds of clangorous noise, deep throbs, and mounting solar winds. It rolls without a hitch into the fluid, Morricone-meets-Boards of Canada shimmy of "Themes from the Big Red". Also worth noting are the prog-hop alarum "Rock the Whole Planet", the amped-up death march "Big Bang", and the weepy, orchestral suite of "Music to Watch Aliens By".
Fingathing and the Big Red Nebula Band closes with the sleek and triumphant bravado of "Return to Earth", a more soothing space muzak to bear Parker and Sneaky home. The thread will surely be picked up, however obliquely, in the next installment of Fingathing's interplanetary romp. The American release of the record also includes a bonus disc called Time Capsule, a collection of five songs culled form their Main Event and Superhero Music LPs, which evince a more traditional instrumental hip-hop style and emphasize the major leaps in technical proficiency, spacious production, genre variegation, and sheer propulsive force Fingathing has achieved. The story remains the same-- wildly improbable and allusively rendered-- but the music has inflated and deepened in a manner befitting the giant robots, imploding planets, and freaky cast of thousands it contains.
