Cut Off Your Hands - You & I

Rarely have I heard of a band as woefully misnamed as Cut Off Your Hands. Look at that name: I can already picture a blood-soaked album cover, a band pic with lots of facial hair and leather, and maybe a few skulls dotted about just for kicks.

Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Cut Off Your Hands are a happy-clappy little indie rock band from New Zealand, about as menacing as Miley Cyrus and about as downbeat as the Backstreet Boys. Sure, their influences are pretty mopey — the singer sounds like Robert Smith of the Cure, the guitarist like Johnny Marr of the Smiths — but Cut Off Your Hands manage to drain every last drop of sadness from their sound. It’s all good down under; too good, if you ask me. By track number ten, the smile’s starting to seem a bit forced.

Triumphant opener “Happy As Can Be” sets the tone nicely. It’s Phil Spector melodrama 101, but unlike most of the Spector-worshippers these days, the band pulls off a deliriously un-ironic homage, all ringing guitars and surging waves of percussion. At certain points, the track is so ecstatic it seems on the verge of exploding; yet with a name like that, surely that’s the point.

The vast majority of the album is just as wildly upbeat. First single “Oh Girl” captures the wide-eyed innocence of early Beatles records to a tee. Think “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” just happier. I know it’s hard — after all, that’s one of the most upbeat rock songs ever written — but it is possible: there’s a childish delight to “Oh Girl’s” chirpy riffs and tinkling triangles that makes twenty year-old Paul McCartney sound like a hoary old man.

Much of the time, the happiness is infectious. “Turn Cold” is about as cold as a kettle of boiling water, guaranteed to smack a smile on any listener’s face; “It Doesn’t Matter” is certainly the most cheerful song about hangovers I’ve ever heard; and “Heartbreak” is just as badly named as the band who wrote it, a blissful crescendo of stuttered hand claps and shimmering strings.

By the end of the album, however, the optimism does start to get wearing. The relentlessly buoyant “Still Fond” is especially trying, like being dragged around a toy store by a wildly over-excited eight year-old. By the nth chorus, I can guarantee that the girl he’s “still fond of” would have walked away.

It should be noted that Cut Off Your Hands do try to live up to their name once or twice. With the exception of the edgy, Bloc Party-esque “Expectations,” the results are quite hilariously atrocious. “Closed Eyes” aims for a scruffy, discordant 80s rock sound, but instead of sounding like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, the lead singer just sounds like someone with a bad stomachache. Note to aspiring indie rockers: being able to whine and moan tunelessly does not a good singer make.

Even more painful is “In the Name of Jesus Christ,” a soporific, acoustic mess which sounds like a parody of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Its self-consciously profound lyrics are just as likely to get a smile on your face as any of the other tracks on the album.

On the whole though, “You & I” is a very promising debut; it shows a band unafraid of sounding unpretentious, which, in today’s alternative rock scene, is pretty hard to come by. These guys produce simple, sun-bleached indie rock, and by and large they do it very well. On their sophomore effort they’ll hopefully discover the importance of nuance, and move beyond simplistic “happy happy happy sad” sequencing.

A name change might help too. I mean, seriously, what is with that name! It’s like seeing your baby boy for the first time and deciding to call him “Cindy.” It’s just very, very silly. And as this album proves, silliness isn’t always the answer.


"You & I" released on February 3, 2009 by Frenchkiss Records.
Images courtesy of Frenchkiss Records and Empire Online.
Published in the Nassau Weekly.