Archive for the ‘reggae’ Category
CD Review: The Bad Hand’s This Is No Time for Modesty
By Julia Cooper
San Francisco experimental trio the Bad Hand seems like the kind of group that’ll try anything once. On This Is No Time for Modesty, the band’s staple rock instrumental base of guitar, Rhodes piano, and drums gets invaded by a gaggle of other genres and sounds, resulting in an ambitious mix of kitchen-sink sonic collages with varying degrees of success.
The band certainly offers enough surprises to satisfy anyone bored with the verse-chorus-verse same-old same-old, as the musicians follow a slew of paths within the album and on the songs themselves. Just when you begin to brace yourself for an all-instrumental record, “Hell Bent” drops in soft, girly vocals; or dirgy grunge falls into good ol’ Southern blues on “Then He Tried to Kiss Me”; or an interlude of fart-like kazoo sounds (“Short Door”) creeps into the batch.
Still Flyin’
MySpace (listen to “Coupla Smokies,” “Mystery Tent”)
Official site
Hometown: San Francisco
Next local show: 2/18, The Makeout Room
Recent release: Time Wrinkle, 2006
Who said young white dudes and dudettes from San Francisco can’t play real reggae? It was you, wasn’t it? Still Flyin’ aren’t rastas (nor do they pose to be), and their style is more indie-rock-meets-rocksteady-and-dub than straight-up roots, but it’s reggae nonetheless. And boy do they jam it out. So shut it!