Milk! Records and Remote Control Records are excited to announce Rolly Nice, the new album fromThe Finks will be released Friday 25 May. To celebrate the announcement, The Finks have shared their first cut from the record ‘Body Language.’ Watch the video below.
The Finks play the songs of Oliver Mestitz. They are sincere but flippant, intimate but aloof, thoughtful but careless.
As Oliver describes the single and video: ‘Body Language started as a melody that I misheard Sarah humming to herself. It stuck with me and I wrote the lyrics a few months later, sitting up the back of a bus. It’s about a woman, the narrator, being hit on at a dinner party. It’s a rebuff song, or at least what could have been a rebuff had the narrator come up with it sooner.
I cobbled together the film clip using footage that Sarah’s family (mostly her Mum) shot on 8mm film in the mid-nineties. My family also had an 8mm video camera when I was growing up and I remember making videos of my brother pretending to be Steve Irwin in the backyard. I like the wobbly pans and zooms, the sickly bright colours, the mottled edges. It’s not perfect but that’s not the point.’
Oliver records everything in his Melbourne home, mostly alone, layering instrument upon instrument and mixing each song straight to tape. Each recording by The Finks hums with the quiet reverie and melancholy of weekday afternoons, when the suburbs lie in wait and the house is at its emptiest.
The Finks have been with Milk! Records since their first EP Things Work Out was released in 2012. Since then, they’ve released two more EPs (At the Royal Witherspoonand Settling) and two albums (LucklasterandMiddling).
Their new recordRolly Niceis a handful of objects, an album of contrasts. It includes sketches for solo piano, a guitar-led instrumental in ‘La Chose’ and a monologue set to music in ‘Charlie’s Manifesto’. Lyrically, ‘Thankful’ and ‘Peter Out’ have the brevity of poems, while ‘Body Language’ and ‘When What Changed Us Changed Us’ take on the complexity and intimacy of other lives lived.
No Finks release would be complete without Sarah Farquharson, who sings, plays cello and reads onRolly Nice. The album also includes vocals and guitar by Jake Core (Soda Eaves). It was mixed by Oliver at home and mastered in Rye with Mikey Young.
Rolly Nice is a patient, wilful and poignantly imperfect album. Each physical copy comes with a booklet featuring lyrics, collages and micro-poems by Oliver. Pre-order Rolly Nice: https://thefinks.lnk.to/RollyNice
