Dan Gatto's voice will get top billing in any review of Babyland's work, and with good reason. I could write poetry about this voice. It's husky. It's been ravaged by -- cigarettes? Whiskey? Face-melting acid? -- something. But beneath the flecks of blood, the ravaged flesh and bulging veins on its surface, you can almost make out the voice his mother knew and loved when he was a child. There's an underlying innocence that comes out whenever he stops screaming long enough to sing, a certain intransient gorgeousness that I'm thoroughly convinced can never be killed. The first time Gatto unleashes this innocence, this strange immobile sweetness, is roughly halfway through The Finger's second song, "Defeated". After a few minutes of sing-song speech and screaming, he looses one almost-melodic line: "There will be no victory / For you and me." It's positively heartbreaking.

Gatto and "Smith", his one-named partner in crime, deftly manipulate samplers, ruined vocal chords and forgotten garbage to create electronic junk-punk as brutal as it is eminently danceable. Perhaps more importantly, it has great potential beyond the dance floor. If I have one major flaw as a listener, it's how easily bored I am. I need sonic thrills. I need textural rotation. Babyland are challenging in this regard, creating ornate rhythmic assaults from a noticeably limited palette. The effect is reminiscent of those once-trendy recordings of African tribes showing their improv stuff: rhythmic figures rise and fall in the mix, their relationships constantly changing, creating an illusion of melody.

Of course, those tribesmen never had samplers with which to enhance their music with cold, synthetic sounds. The samples Babyland use are almost distracting in their commonality, but that's actually one more way the band demonstrate their skills. These guys have been at this music-making lark for more than a decade, and more than anywhere else, you'll hear it in their ability to create thrilling sounds from rudimentary elements. I could probably reproduce most of their sonic palette right now with the very basic software that's on my computer -- but if I did it, it wouldn't be interesting. Babyland's combination of attention to detail and unflagging faith in a good beat -- the sort you normally only find in hip-hop -- mean that only the most inexcusably lazy listeners will be bored by their music.

In standout cut "Past Lives", Gatto sings, or at least comes as close as he ever does to singing, a lot. In doing so, he demonstrates the other major benefit of the experience he has accrued: the confidence with which he forces out these soft, plaintive notes justifies purchasing The Finger on its own. Here, his inner-child comes out the most. "This is the time! / Don't back away. / You still have all your say, / So why not save tomorrow?" He pauses. "Our past moves o-o-on. / Yesterday is not all that you are."

Each cut overflows with existential angst, but solutions are seldom found. Babyland's only answer is a common one, and probably the best I know: just dance. Shaking your ass to Gatto's anguished screams and angst-ridden lyrics may seem a little morbid, but don't worry -- he would have wanted it that way.