Album Review: What Hands Are For - ...Please Believe Me

California based What Hands Are For released their last EP ‘Loud Ass’ back in 2007, however for any fans who can still remember this post-hardcore outfit, their long awaited second EP ‘...Please Believe Me’ is finally upon us – and it’s clear from the off that this band haven’t lost any energy over the past four years.

However, saying that, opener ‘We Love The Knife Night’ is annoyingly quite weak, with its simplistic and quite stale clean/screamed delivery. Yet for what it lacks in vocal style, the instrumentation makes up for this, swaying between fast and slow tempos faultlessly. Their experimentation with structure is a statement that this band is far from comfortable sitting within the confines of the genre. ‘Deer Country’ demonstrates this with a sound that you could almost describe as funky. With just one guitarist, the bass has been given room to really sprawl out with riffs that take this band past a straight forward hardcore delivery.

‘Me Myself and My Terms’ takes this dynamic further with some group vocals while ‘Not Yet...Ok Go’ slows the tempo down and showcases a clean vocal that’s reminiscent of Dance Gavin Dance (Kurt Travis) and compliments the raspy shouts successfully. Closing track ‘Push Waves’ speeds things right up again, yet in rather the same vein as the rest of the five tracks on this EP. All five tracks seem to hold promise of a band willing to experiment with their sound, but what they have ended up with has failed to really push any boundaries. The vocal delivery is as passionate as any other, while the bass work drives the sound, supporting some rather tasty riffs. I’m just not sure how eager you’re going to be to come back this EP more than once. They may not have lost any energy since 2007, yet it’s questionable how much they have progressed.

3/5

‘...Please Believe Me’ by What Hands Are For is available now on Anchor Eighty Four Records.

What Hands Are For on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

Connor O’Brien