Rock Solid

[September 3rd, 2008]

Mayhaw Hoons is upset. It’s almost hard to tell, as his eyes are hidden behind sunglasses and curly, long red locks. But as we sit discussing the music world’s perception of his band, the Shaky Hands, you can see it in the way he curls his brow and tells me about reading something on the Internet yesterday that pegged the Shaky Hands as “blog rock.” The band has been shackled as a good time, shaggy-haired pop outfit. And Hoons, the bassist, is not too happy about it. Don’t let the use of a bongo drum on “Loosen Up” fool you—the Shaky Hands are not “jangle-pop summertime porch-lovin’ hippies,” as Hoons jokes. They’re a rock ’n’ roll band.

“I don’t understand why people can’t just hear a band as a rock band and not try to pin some other word on before it,” Hoons mentions over coffee on a late August afternoon. “The only way you can be called ‘just a rock band’ is if you’re playing bad blues songs at the White Eagle. But rock’s not a dirty word to me.”

Regardless of labels, the Shaky Hands happen to be Portland’s best rock band, a reputation cemented with their jubilant new record Lunglight—a joint release between Holocene Music and Kill Rock Stars. This could be the record that catapults the Hands to national prominence, though it’s coming out during a transitional phase for the group. Original drummer Colin Anderson left the band earlier this summer, forcing the Hands to retool their songs and their sound—no easy feat considering Anderson’s versatility and importance to the new record, where he seems almost psychically linked to singer/guitarist Nicholas Delffs and the rest of the band. “I guess you could say it’s kind of bad timing,” Delffs says about Anderson’s departure, which led to former Shaky Hands multi-instrumentalist Nathan Delffs taking on full-time drum duties. “But we just got used to the idea and realized that [Anderson] really needed to do other things, and playing with my brother on drums has been amazing—it’s been pretty awesome to go back to being a four-piece.”

The Shaky Hands are no strangers to change. They have a tendency to move on to new material just as audiences are learning the words to the last batch of songs, and anyone who has seen the band (now the two Delffs brothers, Hoons and guitarist Jeff Lehman) in the past two years knows that the “jangle” tag is a huge misnomer. The band’s live show remains a visceral, life-affirming affair—with Nick Delffs stomping around the stage, often shirtless, pounding his foot along with the beat and sporadically bobbing his head from the mic like a dolphin coming up for air—but they have outgrown the four- and five-year-old songs from the band’s self-titled debut (which didn’t see release until April ’07).

Lunglight, recorded live at the Silo, a 3,800-square-foot warehouse near the Broadway Bridge, is a grittier affair. The crunchy, stop-and-start riff that carries “Neighbors” is particularly vicious, more Grifters than Grateful Dead.

“Neighbors” shares a similar vibe and lyrical theme with “World’s Gone Mad,” which Hoons admits was taken straight from a band practice with the tape rolling. It’s also the bleakest thing the Shaky Hands have ever recorded. “See it coming/ in his eyes/ you better stay where/ you can hide,” Delffs sings amid swirling, reverb-drenched guitar and tapped strings. It’s one of a handful of songs on Lunglight that finds Delffs diving into these twisted narratives—and though the lyrics are relatively simple, the frustration of trying to cope in a dark new world always peeks through.

Nick Delffs is soft-spoken offstage, dodging questions of influence and songwriting tendencies, but he perks up noticeably when asked about the band’s recent all-ages shows opening for garage-punk survivors Pierced Arrows (the band composed of ex-Dead Moon founders Fred and Toody Cole). The Shaky Hands have been playing a Dead Moon cover, “Fire in the Western World,” for a few months now—and they played it in front of the Coles themselves at the opening gig (after asking permission). The song is not a cover so much as it’s a reworking: The band has taken the earthy, organic punk of the original and turned it into, well, a Shaky Hands song.

“Fire in the Western World” is slated to appear on the band’s next full-length, and—ever looking to what’s next—the boys have already recorded 10 basic tracks they intend to finish in the next few months. This fall will also see the release of Break the Spell, an EP composed of live cuts and odds and ends from the Lunglight sessions. The plan is to stay busy and “[give] it everything for the sake of making good music,” Delffs puts it simply. That’s what rock ’n’ roll bands are supposed to do.