Cut Off Your Hands
You And I
Frenchkiss Records
By Jose Fritz
I got a sneak preview of this CD in tiny increments over 2007 and 2008. The tracks “Still Fond,” “Happy as Can Be,” “Oh Girl,” and “Expectations” all appeared on a series of CMJ Phase Five New Zealand music samplers. I’ve been waiting two years for the other shoe to drop. The four-track sampling felt narrow: catchy, poppy, sweet, and a little jangly everything mid tempo. Every one was individually good, but every one added up to a collective imponderable. I love the insider privilege of the advance copy, the sneak preview, the white label under the table. I hate the incomplete picture, the unmastered copy, the bad mix, and the uncertain track listing. The problem isn’t what you hear, it’s what you don’t hear.
Two of the un-previewed album cuts begat a horrifying question—Is this a Christian rock band? The songs are titled “In The Name of Jesus Christ” and “Someone Like Daniel.” I feel I must dismiss this possibility after much consideration. Saul Williams sings about Jesus, Iggy Pop sings about Jesus; Jesus built a damn Hotrod for Al Jorgenson. For me this defines a wide array of possibilities in which you can praise some Jesus and not be exclusively a Christian rock band. Christian rock isn’t like leprosy; you don’t need quarantined. It’s more like eating at a bad taco truck. If you have a little it can be just fine. If you have any more than that, the day and your pants are ruined.
They were once known as Shaky Hands and only in the course of writing this paragraph did I discover that these are the same band. Some losers in Portland were using that name and they were compelled to change it by lawyers in expensive suits and irretrievable wedgies. Cut Off Your Hands re-released their Shaky Hands demo as the Shaky Hands EP on I am Sound Records in 2006. This early EP was more derivative of the Klaxons, Shitdisco, and New Young Pony Club. But it’s important as it stakes their progression away from the crowd.
It was followed by Blue On Blue in 2007 and Happy As Can Be in 2008. With each step they drifted further and further away from dance punk. Bernard Butler of Suede produced both. Despite the epic reputation of Butler, a producer who has worked with the Verve, Manic Street Preachers and the Libertines I have to attribute their growth to their tour with Foals. The two-year old band from Oxford has an innate grasp of how poppy a song can be permitted to be. Cut Off Your Hands absorbed that through stage osmosis, by performing upon the same wooden planks, breathing the same stale air and rocking the same sweaty crowds. Now you can judge them in whole, or in part, Christian or not, shaky or not but definitely now as themselves.
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