Premiere: Hands, ‘Brave Motion’

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The new music made by the hands of Hands – the L.A. quartet of Geoffrey Halliday, Ryan Sweeney, Sean Hess and Alex Staniloff – feels more like a cumulation (rather than derivation) of the a lot of the last decade’s indie-rock. Synths and samples do battle with insistent beats and tricky polyrhythms, with Halliday’s tenor commingling with Sweeney’s choral backup vocals and a thin veneer of reverb. Hands released their “Cities” EP in 2008, but their recent live shows reveal the quartet to be pursuing a more experimental (and less acoustic) pop bent. Foreign Born, Animal Collective, Vampire Weekend, a dozen or so Brooklyn acts – a lot of bands could be name-checked here, but Hands are worth holding out your arms for.

||| Download: “Brave Motion”

||| Live: Hands play tonight at It’s a School Night at Bardot, at Spaceland on Dec. 2, at the Glass House (as part of Silverlake in Pomona) on Dec. 10 and at the Echo on Dec. 13.