| Pitchforkmedia |
 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....full text |
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| Spin |
| Some hotly tipped, well-groomed, overseas dance-punk groups slink into the public consciousness via disco glitter and a slummy lyrical wit, but this quartet is betting on pure pop firepower. Bernard Butler, hipster rock's Jerry Bruckheimer, produced this impressive debut, a tsunami of galloping rhythms, lightning-charged guitar lines, and choruses that immediately infect your brain. When singer Nick Johnston weeps about, yes, heartbreak in the ballad "Heartbreak," it just proves that an album can be carefully crafted, deeply layered, and utterly unsubtle....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| Put together a bright, breezy guitar pop group with two respected producers and it should be a can't-miss proposition. Unfortunately, Cut Off Your Hands' debut You and I, which was produced by Bernard Butler and Stephen Street (who also mixed), is well-made but, strangely, not as engaging as it should be. The band has an appealing sound, coming off like New Zealand's answer to Maximo Park or Franz Ferdinand (with a touch of the Cure's more upbeat stuff for good measure), and the raw energy of their live shows and early EPs overcame any clichés or obvious influences in their music. The polish Street and Butler bring to You and I reveals just how poppy, and samey, the band's songs can be: it's far from a bad thing that most Cut Off Your Hands' tracks boast huge choruses, but when those choruses feel almost interchangeable from song to song, it's a problem. The album's first half is dominated by tracks that are charming on their own terms -- "Expectations" is refreshingly brash, and "Oh Girl" could be a lost single from some late-'80s new wave band -- but lose their impact as a whole. It's not until the middle of the album, when "Heartbreak" changes from what seems like a typical, strummy acoustic ballad into something stranger with odd backing vocals and keyboards, that You and I gets interesting, albeit not consistently good: "Still Fond" and "Closed Eyes" nail the nervy-yet-sophisticated vibe the first half of the album aimed for, and "Nostalgia" invokes Beach Boys harmonies and a ton of reverb to live up to its wistful name. However, when Cut Off Your Hands try for honest-to-goodness ballads, as on "In the Name of Jesus Christ" and the odd album closer "Someone Like Daniel," they stumble. Even so, You and I's stranger moments reveal that Cut Off Your Hands have more personality than the album's more tasteful songs suggest....full text |
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