04

Open Hand
You And Me


It seems ironic that the best Queens Of The Stone Age album of the year wasn’t in fact released by Queens Of The Stone Age, but rather comes to us courtesy of little known LA stoner pop outfit, Open Hand. Actually, no scrap that, there is a lot more to Open Hand than simply being mere Queens Of The Stone Age copyists. They just clearly share the same view of what constitutes good music. Open Hand’s first album, The Dream, was a perfectly acceptable post-hardcore album in the Kids Near Water mould. This, however, is something else. You And Me is streamlined, focused rock, full of pop sensibilities, but still dripping with cutting edge sounds. Every track is a short, sharp injection of sing along rock action. Open Hand have added a female vocalist (to join singer/guitarist Justin Isham on vocal duties) since the last album, and this adds a totally new dimension to their sound, offering a more sexy and soulful element to their macho posturing. Certainly live this gave them something extra because she is utterly beautiful, and knew exactly how to work a crowd of metalheads, but made sure she didn’t take anything away from her lunatic guitar wielding colleges by moving to the back of the stage on occasion and giving less beautiful band memebers a chance to shine.

This is an album largely without frills, in the main constituting a number of quick, if layered, rock songs to help snap open the eyes and the bottle. Having said that, some of the tracks shift focus significantly, like the intricate harmonies of Isham’s ode to a missing friend ‘Her Song’ and the slightly operatic ‘Jaded’. These work well and give the album depth, but it is the gung-ho straight ahead tunes that really shine, like ‘Take No Action’ and ‘Tough Guy’. The closing track, ‘Hard Night’ is the best of all with its building and deceptively simple intro and its thunderous restart after the false ending to the song: “I was born ready.”

Blinding.