Review: Benjamin Finger – The Bet

Starting the album off with “Faintheadedness,” Finger establishes a dark, ambient theme early with eerie, fairy-like vocals and a spacious simplicity delivered through a shy piano melody. The Bet stays pretty minimal throughout, expanding nominally on phrases that lead to slow and somewhat creepy buildups. “Kids were dreaming landscape”—with more muffled piano tunes in the background and monotonal forefront noise-scapes—is a prime example of this, coming across like a hallucination if you concentrate on it hard enough. At this point, we’re only two songs in. While the entirety of the album maintains this creepy vibe pretty consistently, the moments that morph into pleasant sounds hit you abruptly, as if you suddenly fell down a hole and started floating among angelic monsters in the sky. –Brinley Froelich