Brooding behind their luscious long hair, Canterbury’s psychedelic space rockers Broken Hands step up to fill an unfortunate gap within music at the moment. Broken Hands are blessed with both great riffs and great hair. If Black Sabbath had been into science fiction and space exploration, they might have sounded like Broken Hands’ new single and video, “Meteor.” The video was filmed recently at their Silver Landing Program performance at Electrowerkz in London, complete with 284 square meters of silver parachutes, illuminated by old-school strobe lights while singer Dale Norton created an alternate universe entirely devoid of needless falsetto.
I can’t go into an earnest indie social justice think-piece about the lyrics to “Meteor,” because they are fundamentally repetitious and, thank God, not about a serious cause or some shameful bummer of an experience. No, this song is simply a physical joy to play loud. Even if you couldn’t understand 90% of the lyrics to “Meteor,” that would be just fine. That stompy, fuzzy hard rock guitar would make a listener forgive absolutely anything lacking in this song. One would be compelled to say “Who gives a shit? This guitar is sick.”
Broken Hands’ debut album, Turbulence, is scheduled to be released October 9th (John Lennon’s birthday, incidentally) from So Records and is available for pre-order now. Turbulence might well be the best debut of 2015, contrary to the breathy best-debut-of-the-year announcements that have already been prematurely made elsewhere. Just wait and see.
