"Likable" could be the most withering epithet in the book of faint praise. So the promotional strategy pursued on behalf of the Shaky Hands by Kill Rock Stars and Holocene-- pitching them as Portland's best-liked combo, a band for which no one in the community utters a discouraging word-- is potentially dangerous. If no one hates you, you've gotta be doing something wrong, right? That goes double for rock bands. But the Shaky Hands deserve more than a Miss Congeniality sash or a success-smothering "band's-band" tag. Even when they trade in clichéd themes and done-to-death sounds, they're really good.
Even if it doesn't offer such immediately appealing tracks as "Whales Sing" and "Why and How Come", the Shaky Hands' second LP, Lunglight, is consistently strong. While the debut scrapbooked four years in the local trenches and cobbled disparate influences and enthusiasms, Lunglight is a coherent, well-sequenced collection of often-ferocious, usually catchy, and occasionally sinister tracks. The band is still indebted to early R.E.M., Mission of Burma, and other first-generation American post-punks, but they've kicked the winsome jangle and amateurish faux folk to the curb and pounded a case of Red Bull. "A New Parade" leads the charge with violent chipped riffs, clipped snare beats, and vocalist Nick Delffs' nervy quaver. The record gets more raucous, with guitars bounding, lunging, thrusting in songs like "Air Better Come" and "Settle On", and the percussion throughout skittering like an Iditarod dogpack barreling down a hardwood hallway.
Drowning pop compositions in jittery polyrhythms is indie rock's move du jour, but the Shaky Hands aren't trendy; they make fine-boned, classic rock'n'roll in the Strokes' vein. In fact, Delffs does a spot-on close-mic'ed and breathless Julian Casablancas on "You're the Light" and awesomely named bassist Mayhaw Hoons knows Nikolai Fraiture's tricks-- most striking in the carpe diem ode "We Are Young"-- for tightly controlled propulsion. Obviously, both the Strokes and the Shaky Hands were weaned on the Velvet Underground, but while the former adopts VU's soigné minimalism and self-conscious art pose, the latter takes up the urbane Americana surveyed on Loaded and, in Lunglight's relentless pounding-piano banger "Loosen Up", "White Light/White Heat"'s Lower East Side blues.
The band's lyrics are getting grittier, too. OK, "We Are Young" scans thematically facile, but "Neighbors", punctuated by the pitiless refrain "everything is lost", and "World's Gone Mad", laced with deception and insanity, should put to rest any erroneous assumptions that the Shaky Hands are sunshine in a bottle. Though to be fair, I think I can understand why the residents of gray, rainy Portland might be looking for a feel-good-quick fix.
