To Fly, To Float, To Glide: Charm of Finches' "Malinchen in the Snow"

 

The way Charm of Finches’ 2023 album Wonderful Oblivion grabbed hold last year and sent me back through this duo’s career reminds me of a moment 25 years ago when I watched what I had previously thought was the overrated Hitchcock movie Vertigo for what must have been the fourth time in my life. I spent the next year devouring almost the entirety of Hitchcock’s catalogue with fresh eyes. There's an allure to Hitchcock that's all his own, just as there is an undeniably distinct pull to Charm of Finches.

The enormously varied, spiraling designs that set the hypnotic pace of that Hitchcock movie might be used to describe this Melbourne sister duo’s music. After all, there is a falling feeling that often comes with Mabel and Ivy Windred-Wornes’ blend of guitars, keyboards or fiddles and such close sister voices they seem the matte and the gloss sides of the same length of ribbon. It made perfect sense that Oblivion opened with titles that sounded implacably drawn downward—“Gravity,” “Heavy,” and “Pockets of Stones.”    

Pockets of Stones Single Art

But the Finches' music is anything but fatalistic. The sonic tapestries call to mind the mysterious tides their sea creatures (see first song first album) and their namesake birds use to propel themselves forward. Malinchen in the Snow begins with the pulsing “Clean Cut,” contemplating the beginning of a different kind of journey. Navigation comes from the grounded memories of “Leave It All Behind” and a repeated theme in Finches music, adaptation to the moment, exemplified here by the midpoint’s “Temporary Home.” 

And the most dangerous traps the Finches face are those made in everyday places by everyday people. Though “Middle of Your Mess” is a jangly and irresistible pop song, its subject matter is social manipulation as nasty as it is commonplace, kicked off by parsing double speak like, “You look happy means I wish you were sad.” The abuse in that song is immediately followed by the far-too-common intimate partner danger on “Human.” There’s a promise of a new start again here, but the depth of pain in the closing refrain is underscored by levels of distortion that threaten to blow the whole record apart. 

The title track, “Malinchen in the Snow” echoes and amplifies the essential qualities of the duo’s sound—the gentle scratch of shifting chords punctuating otherwise seamless arpeggios, a deliberate progression on keyboard shining light forward. Based on an old fairy tale, the song’s journey beyond the grave aims to right an injustice. It weds the zen of the Finches' sound with a purpose that focuses the record as a whole. 

Along the way, the percolating rocker “On My Own” dreams of  “compasses and charts” that might be of some help. With a warm guest vocal by the Paper Kites’ Sam Bentley, “If You Know Me” underscores our deep need for one another. By the end, the echoing psychedelics of “In the Dark” celebrate all the beauty “beneath the surface” of our perception. If Malinchen in the Snow can be said to be about falling, it’s never just about falling down so much as forward into the beauty and promise of the unknown.  

 https://www.charmoffinchesband.com/

That night two years ago, when I first saw the act: https://takeemastheycome.blogspot.com/2023/02/folk-alliance-day-3-rakish-charm-of.html