Former Brighton resident Finian Greenall was a relative late-comer to the world of live music, despite his beginnings as an EDM producer and DJ. In his early 30s he dropped the decks and picked up an acoustic guitar, re-inventing himself as a live act, and one with the ‘blues’.

After achieving a degree of success songwriting for others (including John Legend and Amy Winehouse), Fink was on the verge of calling it a day as a touring musician, despite having carved himself out a little patch that generally won the critics over, and saw a large fanbase develop. A noughties trailblazer of sorts for the sort of downbeat nu-bluesesque that has spawned many a subsequent imitator (RY X, Bon Iver etc). Re-locating to Berlin seems to have kept the flame alive and, here we are, with his sixth studio album since he released Biscuits For Breakfast on the Ninja Tune label back in 2006.

Not much has really changed since then. He’s still playing with the same guys he did back then (Tim Thornton and Guy Whittaker), he’s still based within the Ninja Tune stable (albeit via a subsidiary label he set up called R’COUP’D), and he continues to make smoky, laid-back acoustic ambient and atmospheric blues with a downtempo trip-hop vibe. Albeit, this time with the assistance of producer Flood, who had earlier in the year worked with Greenall on Fink’s Sunday Night Blues Club Vol. 1, a series of live studio recordings with a different band. Moreover, he remains a troubled soul, forever seeking some kind of light, and answers, within the general malaise that afflicts him.

“Resurgam, I will rise up, I will rise up again“, he sings on the title track, eight and a half minutes of slow jam-like trip hop spiritualism, a song that derives its name from a Latin inscription in a 900-year-old church in Greenall’s native Cornwall. It’s a theme that permeates throughout, Greenall acknowledging and confronting the negativity. Such as on ‘Day 22’, where hope shines through temptation on this dark blues-funk. Held together by an incessant beat and bass, mangled blues licks and scraped notes here and there, gospel backing vocals are positioned back in the mix, before it crescendos into a minor thrash of a finale, the word ‘free’ popping out in the mix. While on ‘Cracks Appear’ Greenall lets us know there is “No need to cover up the fault lines, they make us who we are.“

When you hear Greenall’s West Country-accented blues moan mixed in with the band’s tetchy, scratchy and noirish trip-hop blues you just know everything isn’t all that great. In the great blues traditions, Greenall is a survivor, and one who wears it on his sleeve. There is hope. Always hope. As on the Douglas Dare piano-backed balladry of ‘Word to the Wise’, where Greenall elaborates on the growing love he’s feeling for A.N.Other. Meanwhile, ‘Not Everything Was Better In The Past’ is also, at core, about some kind of self-awakening, as Greenall pushes and pulls between regret, remembrance, and simply moving on, amidst the moody and foreboding textures.

The pace does quicken fractionally for the Radiohead-esque ‘The Determind Cut’, but the questioning is deep: “How is it that we go our separate ways, only to end up in the same place“.

Towards the end of Resurgam, things get a bit samey, and there’s a sense that Fink are running on fumes. Such as on ‘Godhead’, where a West African guitar, and some rousing percussive grooves fail to elevate this above jam fodder. The moodiness continues unabated – and becomes increasingly wearing – via ‘This Isn’t A Mistake’, and the emotional gloom of ‘Covering Your Tracks’, eerie and cavernous swathes of synths and a deep bass relay a darkening, if rather sonically muddy, picture.

Still, the ever questioning Fink soldiers on, largely successfully marrying his thoughtful lyricism with an atmospheric musicality that will take you on a spiritual journey into his honest inner soul. If you let it!

Jeff Hemmings

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