I'm not sure what music you think would best soundtrack the extinction of the human race, but Lee Paradise has come to the conclusion that the overtaking of our species by the river of time is best accompanied by a righteous funk groove. I know some of you, myself included, would have instinctively picked atmospheric black metal for this score, but when you actually come face to face with oblivion, an aesthetic of bleakness feels dramatically less appealing. If the legacy of myself and my kin is to be reduced to dust, I'd rather have something hummable sifting through my ears while we're cast down the memory hole of the universe. Tremolos just aren't going to do it for me while I'm being buried up to my neck in Cronus's sandbox.
Lee Paradise is Daniel Lee, a former member of Toronto's Hooded Fang, and a guy who also expressed himself through Phèdre once upon a time. He's been out on his own recognizance for half a decade or more, releasing Water Palace Kingdom in 2014, and now following it up with The Fink, and album that, as previously alluded, imagines the world devoid of human life, our artifices and machines lying inert on the ocean floor, like gnawed chicken bones at the bottom of a cardboard bucket.
What struck me immediately about The Fink is how visually compelling it is. The artwork on its cover is stunning of course: a starship cutting through a peach-colored, cream textured cloud above a literal sea of ruin. It looks like a vacation poster drawn by Madhouse for the Trigun anime adaptation. There is also something unquantifiably French and neo-futurist about it, as it was an establishment shot from an unreleased sequel to La Planète Sauvage. This image works to give shape to the sounds of the record for sure, but the compositions are defined by their own physical and visually significant aspects as well. For instance, the lapping quality of the bass grooves of "Message to the Past" almost feel like waves of brine, lapping at your toes while you sit calmly on a deserted stretch of coastline. The only thing that keeps this track and others from feeling like an exotic getaway is their prevailing sense of dread. The haze of anxiety and trepidation that hovers above these compositions in a perpetual overcast is one that emanates from its very body in a vaporous murmuration of desiccated spirit and rusted ambition, clouding the sterile air of a dawn without a human witness.
What's even more intriguing is the album's clear discomfort with the sapien free future that it has constructed. The revolving grooves and calm affect of "Platitudes" is deceptively seized by a low-key simmer of panic, which propels it into a hairy scramble to escape the yawning chasm of fate nipping at its heels. "Present To Ponder" is a cheeky title for a song about a place where there is no longer any intelligent life to contemplate the acid bath of time as it subsumes and digests all of human creation. A seeking groove goads the exploration on this track, traversing into hidden places that have been relieved of the purpose for their design, to a chorus ("You don't know what you want / You can't tell what you need") that illudes to the fact that the only aspect of humanity likely to transcend its decline is absurd and futile nature of its commitments as well as it intellectual and moral infrastructure. An alarming but prescient obersation.
On Lee Paradise's The Fink, the fear of nonbeing and the joy of not knowing become collapsed. We can't know what the world will look like without us in it, how silly all of our petty projects will seem without a human alive to validate and carry forward, and in a sense that is for the best. It's impossible to project yourself into the future a week from now to rationally predict what the near-term consequences of actions will be, let alone a thousand years from now. There is no ultimate goal or logical endpoint to human endeavor, and there is no use in pretending otherwise. Let future alien anthropologists draw what conclusions they will about us, we know how desperate, absurd, and hopeless we are in the present and on our own terms, and therein lies the real tragedy.
