Ignore that date an inch or so above this thing, throw on Red Night, and ask yourself, "what year is this?" Do you want it to be 1999? You could do a lot worse-- Timbaland was at his creative peak, the strength of America's economy could be demonstrated by Memphis Bleek going gold, and you'll get to hear The Soft Bulletin for the first time again. Maybe you weighed 20 pounds less, too. Heady times, all around. The Hundred in the Hands* *can help get you there with Red Night, since it's the kind of record equally at home at Starbucks and Sharper Image, the kind of folktronic coffeeshop fare that got called futuristic so often before the turn of the century, but that just ended up being the sound of then instead of now.
Fitting that Red Night sounds like such a throwback to an economic boom time, as these songs give off a strong whiff of luxury problems, the sense of being unfulfilled while having most of your basic needs fulfilled. It feels like a part of the Hundred in the Hands' DNA: Eleanore Everdell's vocals do convey a certain elegantly wasted sex appeal, adopting pretty much every accepted permutation on "breathy" or "chanteuse." But these songs seem to take place in a vacuum or a mirror, lacking any kind of romantic victim or victor. Likewise, Jason Friedman's programming is slick, gleaming, and sanitized-- sounds that trigger the agreeable idea of paying downtown rents, without having to consider the grit, bustle, or danger that goes along with it. Put together, most of Red Night inevitably rings insular and vaguely dissatisfied. There's nothing wrong with most of the songs here, they just hint at a desire to be ambitious without much of an idea of how to go about it.
"Empty Stations" is a full-scale demonstration of that: there's the anticipatory, minute-long lacuna to begin Red Night, a walloping volume boost on the chorus and the sort of jungle-referencing drum break that's been cropping up in recent productions by Elite Gymnastics and El-P. It does a tremendous job of looking the part of the gauntlet-throwing opener. "Recognise" similarly has some intriguing elements in place: a gnarled, desert blues riff, a loping stumble that matches Everdell's laconic intonations. The stretched-out choral vocals of "SF Summer" and "Stay the Night" generate some narcotic allure as well. But these songs always feel as if they're striving for something spiritually, if not physically-- a chorus that leaves an imprint, a lyric of real emotional payload, a truly novel texture. Unsure of its ability to communicate, most of the lyrics appear to acknowledge its own void as a natural state of being ("Your voice like white noise"). Everdell's lyrics have an almost enzymatic effect, incomplete and suggestive conveyances of the most basic emotions-- "falling in love," "this is love," on the title track and "Stay the Night", respectively. But they're being delivered in a suggestive, post-coital moan, leaving such sentiments sounding confused or even negated-- like an actor getting the wrong read on their script.
The messages are at their most mixed on "Come With Me", where a big power-chord riff references the diamond-selling lacquer Mutt Lange put on tracks like Def Leppard's "Photograph", but just sounds like a cheap laminate. Everdell is subjected to a silo's worth of bouncing reverb, completely incongruous with a composition where everything else screams for extroversion. It's the one throwback to the harder-edged electro-rock that defined their self-titled 2010 debut, which had something of an element of surprise-- Richard X and Chris Zane produced and the Hundred in the Hands siphoned enough NYC post-punk allure to get a couple of Siouxsie Sioux and Karen O comparisons to boot. But taking into account their shift into the murkier, heavy-lidded realm of electro-pop, is the red of the night meant to convey the glare of the seedy after-hour neon, or coming to at 4 a.m. looking at your alarm clock? Too much of Red Night's bleary somnambulance assumes the latter, with overproduced but underwritten pieces that seek to create atmosphere but mostly leave empty spaces that the Hundred in the Hands aren't sure how to fill. Both Everdell's melodies and vocals often just trail off into ping-pong echo as hollowed-out beats trudge barely awake at the wheel.
You're left wondering if Hundred in the Hands are even excited about Red Night. We always like to think of art as being a result of epiphany, of brainstorm, of divine inspiration, but listening to Red Night, I just can't envision bolts of inspiration captured on cocktail napkins, late nights in the studio sculpting that perfect chorus melody. Which isn't to say Red Night is an artistic non-entity: These songs just feel like constructs that help you think about art in a big picture where the Hundred in the Hands themselves just don't seem all that essential.
