As harrowing as that sounds, it does lend itself to the best chorus on the record in On A Break‘s “It’s not that common/It doesn’t happen to every guy/It is a big deal/If it happens all the time”. That is very much offset by Chandler In A Box‘s ugly “Bros before hos” refrain. Sometimes it’s just nice to change the channel, you know. In hindsight, I don’t know why I was surprised. I’ve just looked through their 2012 record Season 1’s tracklisting and seen another four obvious Friends references in the titles. Maybe it’s their thing, but what a terrible thing it is. Maybe I’m being a bit hypocritical, much of my time at university was spent watching Friends. But that was a long time ago now, my tastes are dead refined and that now. Someone needs to find Sex Hands’ collective remote control.
I didn’t want to spend most of this review talking about Friends. Usually the last thing in the world I’d want to do is talk about Friends. I wanted to talk about how the first time I saw them play it was at a house party that was shut down by the police just after they played, it’s just that Sex Hands’ trebly, jangly, recorded-in-a-bucket indie starts to blur into one after a while. The highlights bookend the record with the instrumental Space Song and the closing nonsense of An Eight with it’s barked lyrics and guitar stabs falling apart after just under a minute only to rebuild into frantic riffing and noisy feedback. If only they sounded like they cared this much all the way through. I bet someone will tell me this one’s about bloody Friends as well now. Give it a rest, yeah.
Release Date 17/08/2014 (Faux Discx)
Sex Hands Official | Facebook | Twitter | Soundcloud