AEM117 Hands and Knees

Note: My brother just got mar­ried, and all I’ve been doing over the last few days is eat­ing deli­cious food and wear­ing suits. So, pre­pare for a lot of food analo­gies. I’ll save the tie-tying anal­ogy for next week.

Writ­ing pop songs is a lot like bak­ing desserts (bear with me). A novice would assume that the thing to do is to go heavy on the sugar and just make the damn thing as sweet as humanly pos­si­ble. I mean, that’s what peo­ple go to desserts for, right? Sweet­ness and excess. How­ever, an expert knows that the touch of salt or mint or basil is what makes for a truly superla­tive pas­try expe­ri­ence. To really appre­ci­ate the sweet­ness of a dish, one needs a hint of some­thing savory and unex­pected. The same goes for pop music. Yes, of course, you can’t have a pop song with­out hooks, just the way you can’t make dessert with­out some­thing sweet. But great pop songs are always gar­nished with just enough spice to keep you com­ing back over and over again. (Two exam­ples off the top of my head: 1. The way the melody in Phosphorescent’s “Pic­tures of Our Torn Up Praise” pulls back so hard against the tempo that it almost doesn’t keep up with the chord changes. 2. The way Van Mor­ri­son sings the entirety of “Who Was That Masked Man?” in falsetto.) Large doses of refined and unmod­u­lated white sugar are what get you fac­tory pop music, and if that’s your bag, you are prob­a­bly not here on this web­site read­ing this essay.

Now, I don’t know if Boston indie pop quar­tet Hands and Knees can bake a cake (for some rea­son I want to say no, but there’s no rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion in their bio. I’ll have to tell them to update it), but I do know that they can write a bouncy power pop song that doesn’t cloy even after you’ve lis­tened to it about 20 times in a row. Their Ampeater A-side “Danc­ing On Your Tears” is a per­fect exam­ple, build­ing catchy pop music out of unusual six and nine bar phrases, which phrases con­sist of brief gui­tar stabs, coun­ter­weight bass syn­co­pa­tion, play­ful drum fills, and the slurred twin vocals of Carina Kelly & Joe O’Brien (when they’ve been in a band long enough, two peo­ple can adopt the exact same vocal ticks to the point where they can dou­ble vocal lines that seem undou­bleable). Some pop songs are weighed down by their artis­tic ambi­tions, but here the two are per­fectly in sync. “Danc­ing” bounds and cas­cades along with so much enthu­si­asm pre­cisely because it’s so for­mally off-kilter. The six bar verse phrase always ends just before you expect it to, crash­ing head­long into the begin­ning of the next phrase before you even know what’s hap­pen­ing. Then, in the cho­rus, the elon­ga­tion of the lyrics bread and but­ter (buh-huh-ter) dur­ing the break stalls the bands re-entry just enough to make you feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under you, only to fly back into another ram­bunc­tious verse. Even the sim­plest part of the song, the lyric-less bridge, runs out two bars ear­lier than you’d expect, only mul­ti­ply­ing the momen­tum. All this form-play might sound com­pli­cated, but the song leaps along with the bound­less energy of a new puppy, and you’d never notice a thing unusual about it until you’d already heard it count­less times.

B-side “The Moon­light Is Wicked” is sim­pler for­mal fare for the most part, but dev­as­tat­ingly catchy and dot­ted with major two and three chords that spice up the tonal­ity nicely. It also fea­tures some lovely jangle-twang lead gui­tar over the tagged ends of the cho­ruses and the cou­plet you like sim­ple fun / I like depres­sion, the bril­liance of which speaks for itself. The rolling rim-click per­cus­sion in the verses lets the song breathe and hang back until the repeated, saucy you’s bring it to a boil and shove us on into the bliss­ful cho­rus. It’s a song that’s full of indie pop touch­stones: the duel boy-girl vocals, the gui­tar hook answer­ing the cho­rus melody, the silly humor of the verse lyrics. Even the verse pro­gres­sion is tried and true. If I wanted to bust out a sec­ond totally unnec­es­sary culi­nary anal­ogy, I’d liken a song like “Moon­light” to a per­fect pasta sauce. It’s noth­ing you’ve never seen before, yet when it’s put together with enough time and care, it can be the most sat­is­fy­ing meal you ever ate. Seri­ously, be care­ful with this one, folks. Once you pipe it into your head, it will not want to leave.

Both of these jams come cour­tesy of Hands and Knees’ new, as-yet-untitled full length, gen­er­ously made avail­able by the band for free perusal on their Band­camp page. The whole record is full of gan­gly energy, pop­ping snare drums and tasty gui­tar hooks. But not only that. Some­thing about the album makes you feel like you are lis­ten­ing to your friend’s band, if they sud­denly got their shit together and started writ­ing really great songs. Hands and Knees call them­selves unfussy, and it’s true. There’s some­thing self­less and eager about these songs. They want to tag along and make your walk to work a lit­tle eas­ier. They want to give you some­thing to whis­tle while you’re mak­ing cof­fee. There’s no frills and no need­less obscu­rity, just fan­tas­tic pop music with a dash of the unex­pected. Heat and serve.

Gabe Birn­baum

Side A — Danc­ing On Your Tears Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — The Moon­light Is Wicked Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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