Shaking Hand
Melodic Records
16th January 2025 (album release)
Journeying through an ever-expansive stretch of time, Shaking Hand’s new single “Mantras” takes its time to build, pedaling around hypnotic repetition of twangy guitars. Lulled into a dreamlike state, we are led upwards voyaging into a destabilising environment, where tempo and volume are slowly increased, and are just as quickly dropped. Disguised within the deconstructed soundscape of the city, vocals call out like phantoms, obscured and hard to distinguish.
The band’s Women and Slint-inspired work is bound upon the unpredictability of the future and the impossibility to stare straight into it. The six-minute track is dizzying as it cycles around, pulsing with the desire to achieve this unattainable aspiration. Situated somewhere not quite in line with the present, it falls amidst the past and the future, where nostalgia, longing, and hope are both fostered and fester.
Enveloped with warmth, Shaking Hand’s debut work penetrates the enshrouding haze of winter, cradling you in light. Nostalgic and uncertain, it slowly reels you in, leaving you drifting through an unidentifiable point in time or place.
Recording among towers stretching and expanding, Shaking Hand have shown themselves as pushers against the monotonous drone of a city constantly in transformation. Whilst it is situated among the changing landscape of Manchester’s industrial past, this destabilisation of places being redeveloped before they are established is universal and accelerating exponentially.