If this album is anything to go by, there's an awful lot of adrenalin pumping through Liam Finn. Not because every song is a charging, 150bpm, ecstatic synth spinner like Burn Up The Road (which is utterly brilliant), but because even in the slower, murkier tracks there's a sense of crackling anticipation and a feeling that you're breathlessly bounding through an alternate world, trying to take it all in.
There's a lot to absorb - it's quite a far reach from the compelling singalongs of I'll Be Lightning, and it goes a step deeper than FOMO, but for all its inventiveness and incomparability, The Nihilist is completely engaging.
Straight-up pop songs these are not, but your ears will follow Finn down his late-night New York rabbit hole with eagerness to hear more.
Written and recorded over 12 months or so from a Green Point, Brooklyn studio, you can hear the nocturnal state Finn pushed himself into; getting manic and mad as he gazed across the metropolis in the wee hours, wondering about all the different stories unfolding down there. You see, The Nihilist is not the album of hopelessness and negativity the title might suggest, but rather an exploration of the idea that there might be more to it all than what we see and believe.
And that might sound a bit political, or philosophical, or dark for an indie-rock album. But it's actually great fun - in a stay-up-all-night kind of way.
