Cut Off Your Hands - You & I (Album)

Cut off your hands! Or rather don’t… I’m not sure how many times that joke’s been used, but that’s one more to add to the list! Huzzah! Anyway… You & I is the debut offering from the Kiwi pop-rock 4-piece, and it promises good things indeed. My Expectations for the future are high indeed! Harr harr harr… sorry.

Cut Off Your Hands are a New Zealand-based indie band, bringing you radio-friendly tunes from Auckland. They spawned themselves in 2006, and have since toured around Oz in the infamous Big Day Out festivals. Other than those, they tend mainly to stick to the smaller, more intimate gigs. Many of you, like me, were probably nodding along to two of their offerings, Expectations or Oh Girl, without knowing it, as they have recently received a fair amount of radio play from less-mainstream stations such as Triple J. Suits me!

You & I is an interesting mix of pop-rock tunes, full of sprightly guitar tinkles and energetic drum beats. It is sort of in the mould of the Kaiser Chiefs Employment and Franz Ferdinand’s debut, with a few differences. The guitars are tuned up, and as a result the music is much brighter and more ‘morning’, if I can describe music in terms of time, than Franz’s ‘afternoon’…. More the sort of music that you bop along to in the car rather than dance to in the clubs. Cut Off Your Hands’ singer Nick Johnston seems able to maintain considerably lengthy notes without taking a breath, and there are numerous percussion-type innovations such as chimes, etc. I likes it, I does.

The major criticism I have of the album is that the two leading songs, Expectations and Oh Girl, are high above the level of the rest of the album. You know those albums where you just keep playing the same two songs? Yeah, it’s a little like that. Not that there’s anything wrong or sub-standard with the other tunes; they just aren’t at the same level of hook-saturated pop catchiness that the leaders are. There is promise in there though; particularly in the fifth song It Doesn’t Matter, with its nice lengthy, catchy chorus. Never mind the fact that half of the rhymes don’t! Experience will surely increase the vocabulary…

Promising things here! Perhaps the next album will be the ripper that sets them off and makes Australians everywhere say “Cut Off Your Hands? Oh, yeah, a great Aussie band.”

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