PRE-ORDER LP or CD!! Physical release date has been moved out to 6/12. Digital download available now HERE or complimentary with order of LP or CD.
Download a free song from The Hand To Man Band along with a handful of other goodies from Post-Consumer Records HERE
Tim Barnes (skins on Silver Jews, Jim O’Rourke, Text of Light)
John Dieterich (guitarist for Deerhoof, Natural Dreamers)
Thollem McDonas (legendary solo pianist, member of Tsigoti, collaborator with Stefano Scodanibbio, Nels Cline, etc ad infinitum)
Mike Watt (fIREHOSE, Minutemen, spielgusher, et al)
Veering between the tightly woven and the completely unhinged, trading deep gulfs of ponderous melancholy with gentle, fractured pop fairytales, The Hand To Man Band keeps the listener guessing without ever completely abandoning their own special brand of earthy hall-of-mirrors music.
The internal/external dialogues set up by the band evoke train dreams, the open road, and the warmth and familiarity of a bed at home. They travel from psychotropic jazz to konked-out funk to skronked-out dirges to alien transmissions to plaintive nocturnal pleas, sometimes in the course of a single tune. These songs contradict and then coalesce before arriving finally as an unexpected gift, a measured unit, a fully formed whole. When that happens, that razor’s edge shift from near-chaos to strength, power and beauty, hold on tight, listen, because it is truly something to behold.
Opening track ‘Forces Conspiring’ welcomes listeners with a bloodshot ghost-choir floating lightly en masse over a bed of bucolic memories strummed, plucked and plinked by the band – the air is not quite heavy tonight and it feels good to breathe. “We Learned the Unreasoning’ is what it sounds like when your favorite weird uncle shows up unannounced with a dose of the clap, a limp, and a bottle of something or other, and all he wants to do is sit on the front porch and have a time. That same uncle taught you how to play guitar; you oblige. The lovely, shambolic ‘The Down Moveables’ ebbs and flows through shallows and driftwood before upping the tension and lighting out on some crazy moonlit steeplechase through an abandoned amusement park down by the river. Other highlights include ‘Us All Konked,’ ‘Voice Thrower,’ and ‘They Pretty Right,’ but truth be told, there’s not a clunker among them.
Track listing for “You Are Always on Our Minds” by The Hand to Man Band, out on 12” virgin vinyl, cd and digital 6/12/2012, Post-Consumer Records.
- Forces Conspiring
- Before Our Eyes Arrived
- We Learned the Unreasoning
- Thinks This
- Buoy Buoy
- They Pretty Right
- First Shallows
- Occasional Cracker
- All Us Konked
- Farces Perspiring
- Semina System
- The Down Moveables
- Voice Thrower
- Be the Same
- Thin Incision Split Decision
- Slow Choirds
- We’ve Got a Long Ways to Go We’re Almost There
Engineered by Nicholas Taplin
Art/layout by Rachel Carns