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.

Some of the tracks that fail to catch on weave together so many melodic and genre-hopping fragments that they leave listeners with little to grasp onto. The occasionally rough mixes, as on the hard-rock mishmash “How to Know When” and on the tail end of the disjointed “South Door,” which awkwardly melds a church organ with Southern blues guitar, can make one wonder: Are these guys all playing the same song?

But the band is legitimately enjoyable when it tones it down a few notches and sticks to one groove, like on “En Attenant De Baiser,” a proggy swirl of fuzzy guitars and shifting time signatures that drifts into funky jazz percussion and discordant piano tinkers; “The Twist,” which melds a paced electro pulsing with rainforest flutes and romantic whispers; and the best track, “Lo Ha,” a somber acoustic tremolo piece blended with funereal violin for a chilled out and downright lovely ambiance.

Perhaps most admirably, This Is No Time for Modesty showcases a band with oodles of energy that, when focused, can traverse a range of music and still pull it off — most of the time.

Hometown: San Francisco
Next local show: 10/19, 12 Galaxies
Upcoming release: Trumpery Metier, 2006

[This post originally published 8/22/06.]

Ahhh…beautiful. Instrumental prog-rock. Crime in Choir play it as well as anyone you’re likely to hear — anywhere. NASCENT got its hands on the band’s upcoming 10/31 release, and it’s a doozy: a cinematic, technical, aggressive, utterly imaginative and flawlessly performed doozy. Trumpery Metier is the band’s third full-length in six years and first with Gold Standard Laboratories.

On the surface, Crime in Choir may seem like just one in a gang of instrumental prog/post-rock groups in San Francisco. The passive observer may struggle to avoid pat comparisons to local standouts like Continental, the Ebb and Flow, the Rum Diary, and Audio Out Send. But that’s a big mistake. The new album, which improves upon an already strong formula, contains not a dull moment — a certain accomplishment in the genre, achieved through creativity that knows no limits. Drawing heavily on math-rock and avant-garde jazz, Crime in Choir deftly violate the already broad boundaries of instrumental prog- and post-rock. And they do it with an energy that is instantly contagious. Grand, baroque, and utterly pretentious: we fuckin’ love it.

INCESTUOUS A-LIST LINE-UP:
-Famed Hella drummer Zach Hill co-founded and just recently departed from Crime in Choir.
-New drummer Tim Soete also plays in the equally rad Fucking Champs.
-Pianist/keyboardist Kenny Hopper, the other CiC co-founder, also co-founded At The Drive-In.
-CiC Guitarist Jarrett Wrenn was another founding member of At The Drive-In.
-Fucking Champs guitarist and local studio maven Tim Green produced Trumpery Metier.