Even before I got around to giving the music a spin, I loved everything about Hand Gestures, even the band’s name seems ambiguous enough to cover both the pleasant and the profane! Even though Brian Russ has long been associated with great bands – Backwords, Spirit Plate, The Love Supreme – and is the founder of indie label Campers’ Rule Records, this new project has a really DIY origin.
Written mainly during a road trip, on a childrens guitar (because it took up less space in the trunk), recorded in “bedrooms, bathrooms, and a BQE-adjacent rehearsal space” and produced and mixed in the hours after the kids went to bed, at the end of the two-year proces he had a brilliant debut album and a really great band to show for it.
You could stick the tag indie, alternative, or underground onto what’s going on here, but that would be too vague to really get to how great these songs are. “Once it Starts to Kick In” shows the band’s brilliant blend of raw, college-rock vibes and squiggly electronica, straightforward indie-band structures used as a place to hang all manner of more interesting sonics.
“Blacked Out” is abrassive and raw, yet litling and seductive, in its own sort of way, “Indication Signs” reveals a poised, post-punk prowess at work and “A Patch of Sun Left in the Sky” is one of those alternative tracks that could have been born in any era from the sixties onwards, and yet still be wonderfully just out of step with fashion.
The album’s final track, its eponymous swansong, sums up the fact that Hand Gestures are brilliantly wandering along their own path, unaffected by fads and fashion, trends, or zeitgeist. And it’s a deeper album than the oft-humorous lyrics and slightly ragged music might suggest.
As Brian Russ himself explains about this final song that seems to sum up the album as a whole, “it’s alright for you to cry sometimes when you know it ain’t working out right… We label everything in life, but sometimes there’s no label for what we’re going through — and that’s okay.”
Amen to that, brother.
