It starts with a shaft of noise, drums, and distant sounds like suppressed howls: a fair sense of where Works and Shoots intends to take its audience. At the two-minute mark, an elegantly suspended guitar motif rolls in, followed by carefully chosen growling bass notes. The vocals etch their own melodic line, sometimes in tune with the bassline and sometimes jarringly discordant. For handturner, vocals are just one more instrument, one more texture. In ‘Hey Killer’, the lyrics underscore the darkness, Franki Hand’s voice jaunty: “I can’t tell you what to do, but / in your shoes I’d walk away / I’d swallow tacks / I’d walk right over broken glass”. The vocal hook in ‘W’ is addictive: “I make out like: lucky!” she sings, the key skewing at an angle to the bassline, the song’s brevity and exhuberant drums leaving the listener wanting more.
‘Detroit’s Fifth Franchise’ enters with rat-a-tat drums and the stutter of a knob turned just off station, giving the uneasy sensation of automatic gunfire. Noise and bass slowly gather urgency until the piece climaxes, then drops to the trills of demented angels, the build somehow reminiscent of that of Sonic Youth’s ‘Mildred Pierce’.
Like Sonic Youth, handturner is something of a jam band, embracing improvisation, even to the point of changing instruments mid-song. It comes a revelation that handturner comprises just two individuals, Franki Hand and Ike Turner, joined for Works and Shoots by Randall Davis. All are multi-instrumentalists; here, Hand contributes guitar, bass, vocals and electronics, Davis brings electronics and percussion, and Turner drums, guitar, bass and percussion. Hand and Turner are both longtime members of the punk and experimental music scenes in Kalamazoo, including the psych rock band Wowza and The Kalamazoo Drone Society, but the handturner project has given them rein to stretch their improv skills.
The album closer is the dense ‘Owari’, where a gruff bassline dances with what, in any other song, would have been a drum solo. It’s thick, rough, brain-cleansing noise, so that when the guitar enters about half-way through it’s surprising, heralding a digital cacophony of noises and effects, from videogame to rubberband. And that’s where this album lives, really — compellingly, for those of us who embrace interstitial auditory spaces, between ambient texture and noise celebration.
