Hundred Hands, Her Accent Was Excellent

I’ve always been kind of conflicted on The Appleseed Cast, the long-lived “main band” of Hundred Hands vocalist/whateveralist Aaron Pillar (his former Hundred Hands/Cast cohorts, Christopher Crisci and Ed Rose, have apparently dropped out, leaving everything to Pillar and new co-producer Peter Buxton). On one hand, those four Kansas kids were pretty instrumental in making the whole emo-rock scene into the melancholy juggernaut it became for a short while — they pushed the boundaries between post-punk indie and old-school prog-rock with their convoluted, literate songs. On the other hand, though, the songs themselves never really resonated all that much with me. I liked ’em, and apparently my subconscious latched on fairly tightly to their first disc, The End of the Ring Wars, but consciously, they never really made that much of an impact. They were important, yes, but not exactly something I’d find myself listening to every single day.

After hearing Her Accent Was Excellent, the latest from Pillar’s Hundred Hands project, though, I’m wondering if that two-sided thing isn’t what it’s all about to begin with. This album seems to be about a fight between the two disparate sides of Pillar’s songwriting personality — on one side, he’s enamored with studio-created textures, with all those neato swirling washes of noise and crinkly electronic sounds, while on the other, he’s a low-key, pop-rock-loving guitar strummer. Throughout Accent, the two sides trade off, noise and guitar rock, until the last third of the album, where they meet face-to-face in the excellent, mind-bending “Dude, You’re Drunk.” The track starts out as pretty, straightforward jangle-pop but then mutates into a Faint-esque robofunk workout before melding elements of both and soaring up into the sky.

On the “guitar” end of things, there’re tracks like “Waiting in Denver, 4:05 AM,” which comes off like a warbly, soft-rock version of the Cast’s older, more rocking stuff — it’s nicely done, but God, somebody tell them to please never use that cheesy keyboard sound again. It hurts my teeth. (While we’re at it, guys, I’d suggest that you not use a sticker to hold your CD closed; one slip when opening, and I had to break out the Goo-Gone to be able to play the damn thing. I’m just trying to help, here…) There’s also “Afflicted by Affection,” a piece of swinging, languid-yet-electrified blues, and “Misinformation Rules,” which reminds me a bit of The Gloria Record but with much lower-key vocals; I particularly like the more upbeat, cheerier bit near the end. The feel of the disc as a whole is very downbeat and melancholy, so breaks like that are welcome when they (rarely) appear.

Also, where the last Hundred Hands album, Little Eyes, seemed to kind of point backwards to The Appleseed Cast’s early, more explicitly emo stages right when The Cast were diving headlong into space-rock with their pair of Low Level Owl CDs, Accent embraces the motif wholeheartedly. The best example’s probably the very last track on the album, Gayhouse.com, which is far cooler than the idiotic title might suggest and which nears Spiritualized territory in its atmospheric majesty and drifting vocals.

Then there’s the more overtly “electronic” end of things, which is…well, it’s okay. My initial reaction to the alternately plinky and funky “How Many Licks to the Center” was to sit back and scratch my head, but when Pillar and Buxton kept throwing the little chunks of studio wizardry into the mix, they almost started to coalesce into something interesting. That’s almost, mind you. The sound varies, making me think of The Octopus Project (with less urgency or danger to it) at some points and Peter Gabriel’s instrumental moments at others, with a few points in-between like “She Disappears,” a tiny, blink-and-miss-it bit of glacial, staticky pop, like Statistics’ Denver Dalley with an even shorter attention span.

The undisputed highlight of the “electronic” tracks, though (other than “Dude, You’re Drunk,” as noted above), would have to be “A Downtown Scene” — I love the murky, distorted bass that slinks along beneath the jangle. Sadly, the remaining tracks — particularly in the album’s second half — drag the rest down, feeling more like “look what I can do!” studio experiments than actual compositions. “On Fire with a Dolphin” is nice and all, but at the end of the day it’s just meaningless fluff, as is the roars-and-bleeps of “Don’t Fall Asleep” and the utterly baffling robotic drums and distorted vocals of “Give Up, Yeah.”

To that last one, I’d say this to Pillar: yes, please do give up. Don’t give up music, no, but quit fighting with yourself and grab hold of both sides of the music you’re creating, rather than switching between the two. Her Accent Was Excellent is a fine, fine effort, far better than I’d expected, but if the next Hundred Hands release were more like “Dude, You’re Drunk,” well…you figure it out.