Lee Paradise - The Fink (2020)

Toronto musician Daniel Lee’s second solo album delivers a dark and relentlessly funky set of proto-industrial grooves with a sleek dystopian edge. A decade ago, Toronto band Hooded Fang specialized in the kind of jovial, sun-kissed indie pop that flourished in the mid-to-late aughts. Their 2010 debut, Album, was full of cheerful garage rock smoothed over with handclaps and horns; an accompanying music video featured colorful shots of a puppet playing the xylophone. Yet by the mid-2010s, the band had left the Sesame Street cosplay behind, dousing their sound in jagged noise-punk aggression on 2016’s Venus on Edge.

One missing link in that evolution: Water Palace Kingdom, singer Daniel Lee’s 2014 solo release under the name Lee Paradise, a bleak and underappreciated gem steeped in chilly krautrock precision and Silver Apples minimalism. Six and a half years later, Lee Paradise has finally delivered a follow-up. Yet neither Hooded Fang’s slide into dissonance nor anything Lee has done previously could quite prepare fans for The Fink, an uncommonly funky set of proto-industrial grooves topped with emotionless vocals drained of all discernible human qualities.

The album’s sleek dystopian edge may be fortuitously well-timed in 2020, but it’s not by happenstance. Lee’s goal was to summon the sound of “a wasteland where the sun doesn’t shine and humans have long ceased to be relevant beyond contributing to their own self-destruction.” In the tradition of generations of anxious punks before him, he succeeds in making such a grim vision danceable, plunging into staticky dance-punk (“Boogie”), an uneasy approximation of dub (“Maintaining Platitudes”), and queasy synths that shriek like those not-quite-real emergency alarms in disaster movies (“Positive Manifestations”).