Cloud Becomes Your Hand | photo by Christopher Swane | courtesy of the artist
Cloud Becomes Your Hand brings quirky art-pop to Space 1026
Don’t get put off by the self-conscious “weirdness” of Brooklyn art-pop sextet Cloud Becomes Your Hand. Their live sets boast oddball outfits, spasmodic choreography, and craft-fair accoutrements – hell, their name was inspired by a hand puppet that frontman Stephe Cooper employed in another (presumably even quirkier) band. But look past the arch theatrics and the band’s delightfully off-kilter songs inhabit the same catchily cerebral terrain as earlier bands that weren’t afraid to bubble-wrap their complexity inside kiddie show trappings – names like DEVO and the Residents come easily to mind.
Sonically, though, the band’s sound leans more to the spacey, toe-tapping angularity of Henry Cow, the influential Brit avant-rock band founded by Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson in the late ‘60s. Their buoyant but wiry melodies and frenetic rhythms sound like far-flung folk musics reimagined by a robotic exotica group and then mutated by cosmic rays.
Led by multi-instrumentalist Cooper, the electro-acoustic ensemble never lets the weird overpower the craft on Rest in Fleas, the band’s second release on Northern Spy. They’ll bring the whole psych-surreal carnival to Space 1026 on Saturday, May 28, on a bill with Old Maybe, Hermit Thrushes & Jepeto Solutions.