Hand To Man Band - You Are Always On Our Minds (Vinyl LP, CD)

On this record multiple earth humans from famous bands make music which is a little more explorative and challenging than they can get away with in their primary projects. We’ve got Lord Mike of Watt on bass with a keys dude who’s played for everybody, a Deerhoof guitarist and the drummer for Silver Jews and Jim O’Rourke. The music on here is awkward and disjointed and slips in and out of grooves and is strongly reminding me of the out-there free experimentalism of Senor O’Rourke’s more playful output.

When the vocals come in on third track ‘We Learned The Unreasoning’ it briefly goes a bit Captain Beefheartian, but in a clumsy, deliberately messy way, with the minimal shuffling groove allowing Monsieur Dieterich’s sloppy, barely-formed guitar wrangling to really take centre stage in a manner not a million miles from Drainolith.

There’s an amorphous deconstructivist bent to everything on here, with the minimal arrangements and disjointed, stumbling melodies mirroring the constant, crumbling, gibbering relentlessness of your puny mortal subconscious. Half-written pop songs reduced to their component parts and left scattered ambiguously around the room for a knowingly clever mess. This ReviewBot appreciates the mechanical efficiency behind the chaos on this disc.