Last October, Cut Off Your Hands played a CMJ showcase at Cake Shop, a basement venue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with oppressively low ceilings and the ambience of a crowded subway car. There were probably 50 people in attendance. Thirty seconds into their first song, lead singer Nick Johnston-- a pouty-handsome blond kid with wispy bangs and the lithe, compact frame of a skater-- ran into the audience. He leapt onto the bar. He jumped back onstage and ran through every lead singer pose in rock history in three minutes. The energy was equal parts dumbfounding and disarming, and it sent a resounding message: Cut Off Your Hands are rock stars.
Or rather, they will be within the year, if they have anything to say about it. After a brief, uneventful stint as a Dischord-style hardcore punk band in their hometown of Auckland, New Zealand, they moved to London, hooked up with Libertines producer and ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, and abandoned their hardcore roots. On You and I, their full-length debut, they aim for a synthesis of starry-eyed Britpop with post-punk's brittle rhythms and girl-group harmonies. On lead track "Happy As Can Be" it meshes incredibly well: Over a down-from-Valhalla drum roll straight out of "Then He Kissed Me" and rumbling guitars, Johnston yelps a descending melody in his baby Robert Smith tenor that recalls "Be My Baby" when it doesn't echo "Please Please Me" while his compatriots bellow "whoa-oh-ohs" into the great beyond.
From there, Cut Off Your Hands get more winsome ("Oh Girl", "Turn Cold", "Still Fond"), more wry ("It Doesn't Matter"), and more confrontational ("Expectations"), but, though the journey is boppy and ingratiating, they never re-bottle the lightning of "Happy As Can Be". It's certainly not for lack of trying: Between quoting an encyclopedia's-worth of UK guitar pop influences (Buzzcocks! The Smiths! The Jam! Collect 'em all!) they also somehow manage to lift the melody of Weezer's "Holiday" wholesale for "Heartbreak".
In their slightly glib mastery of pop-song forms, and their apparent belief that great pop music can be forged through sheer force of will, Cut Off Your Hands sometimes recall Bloc Party. The difference, thankfully, is that Nick Johnston seems far more appraochable and grounded. One shudders to think what Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke might do with a song title like "In the Name of Jesus Christ"; Johnston, in a moment of pure Ray Davies, mostly just uses it to wryly point out that his mom's best friend's husband, the church accountant, "stole from everyone we knew." He flashes a similar impishness on the self-deprecating "It Doesn't Matter", a sunny ode to his afternoon hangover that boasts a chorus nearly matching first-album Killers for swagger. Johnston might want to keep that shit-eating grin around for the inevitable indie stardom that surely awaits him; it's a good look.
