ARTIST: Fink
TITLE: Biscuits For Breakfast
LABEL: Ninja Tune Records
GENRE: Indie
BITRATE: 158kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 21m total
RELEASE DATE: 2006-10-31
RIP DATE: 2006-09-23
Track List
----------
1. Pretty Little Thing 4:39
2. All Cried Out 4:44
3. Biscuits 3:56
4. All Cried Out (Napster Session) 3:41
5. You Gotta Choose (Acoustic) 4:12
Release Notes:
http://www.ninjatune.net/fink
http://www.myspace.com/finkmusic
http://www.ninjatune.net/
NOTE: This is a radio sampler for the upcoming US release of this album. This
sampler has two exclusive unreleased tracks not on the full length album nor
have been released to date (tracks 4 and 5). so enjoy them.
What Fink has achieved is to have been reincarnated as Ninja Tune's first ever
guitar-toting singer-songwriter. Immersed in a very personal labour of love, the
brooding Bristol-bred, Brighton-based artist has written, produced and performed
a striking, stripped-down symphony of an album. Like a twenty-first century John
Martyn, Fink's insistent songs are flushed with bruised basslines and skinny
blues licks. And they're exceptional.
"When I was sixteen, music to me was all about the guitar," reveals Fink. "I was
obsessed with it - I played the guitar constantly and immersed myself in indie
rock. Thenà" he shrugs coyly, "I discovered the bright lights and illicit
pleasures of raving - and the two just don't mix!" Seduced by house and Acid
Jazz, Orbital and The Orb, he made what he now self-deprecatingly calls "a
horrible" ambient techno record ("I was part of the
make-dance-music-in-your-bedroom revolution of 1990," he says chuckling.) That
first record earned him a deal with Ninja Tune Records. Fink was delighted. But
he promised himself his guitar playing would be his "private thing - something I
would do only when no one was listening." And so it was.
In 2000 Fink released Fresh Produce on Ninja Tune's experimental imprint, Ntone.
This much-touted trip-hop-tinged album was packed with funky, dub-driven beats.
But following years of DJ gigs around the world, he realised his fling with
electronic music had run its course: "I wasn't interested in what I was supposed
to be doing anymore. Something was missing. I thought of all the artists that
inspire me û Joni Mitchell, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, John
Martyn - all the Js! - and what I love about them. What makes their music unique
is that they pour themselves into it. And that's what was missing from my music
- ME."
This epiphany inspired Fink to go crawling back to his first love û guitar
music. "Like a 16 year-old, I went to every gig I could get a ticket for," he
says. "From grown-up gigs like Sting and Coldplay to thrash metal like System Of
A Down or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs playing in some shitty indie hole. I wanted to
suck it all in, absorb it all. I devoured music. And it made me want to play
Barflys so that I could be a part of it in some way."
With the quasi-masochistic verve of an adrenalin junkie, Fink began creating an
album that would turn him inside out. Armed with his trusty six-string, Fink
wrote and sung the albumÆs first single æPretty Little ThingÆ in his home studio
over a weekend. Desperate for an honest opinion, Fink took his completed song to
Ninja and lied: "I told them I'd used an unknown guest vocalist from the States.
I said æàhe's really young, really hot, blah, blah, blah - what do you think?Æ "
It was only after Ninja commissioned an album's worth of material that the
newly-born singer-songwriter admitted it was all his own work.
The resulting album, Biscuits For Breakfast, is everything Fink hoped it would
be: a collection of intriguingly personal, folk-inflected, acoustic soul songs
that are essentially and intrinsically him. And aside from a guest appearance
from Tina Grace on the lush æHush NowÆ, they are all tales told in Fink's own
voice. "These songs are VERY real," confirms Fink earnestly. "They are very much
about my life. Every song has a mental image attached to it and every time I
sing those songs I'm taken right back there, feeling those emotions again."