Manchester trio Shaking Hand share debut single ‘Over The Coals’ via Melodic Records.
A long-standing word-of-mouth favourite for those in the know among Manchester’s thriving band scene, a debut single from Shaking Hand has been a long time coming. But even still, as ‘Over The Coals’ meals out its first twangs and snare taps, we’re still made to wait. Four minutes of exquisite preamble later – itself a brooding poison of emotive slowcore and spidery American Football expansion – the ‘song’ then ‘begins’.
Delivering that wandering instrumental into dazzling new relief, George Hunter’s ghostly vocal skulks through the mist – “Life Not Linear. Life’s Not Linear” – and Shaking Hand break out from their chrysalis to butterfly into a proud and glorious shoegazing life. It’s a life that, as any witness to their gigs might attest, has plenty more tricks up its sleeve still to be revealed…
And alongside these self-determined ‘Modernist Post-Rock’ manoeuvers, the associated imagery of unused LA Architectural plans from the 1960s provides all the appropriate metaphors: Shaking Hand are a trio of clean lines, meticulous planning, and comprehensive visions, with one foot in the idealisms of lost fantasy, the other pitched in the gristle and grime of the post-industrial present.
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