Hard-core music may finally be coming of age. Newcomers on the scene, Handsome, whose self-titled first release on Epic Records hit stores last February, have a tightly controlled sound that belies their origins in the excessively loud New York City hard-core scene of the mid-eighties.
Although Handsome is a relatively new band, the individuals in the group have a good deal of respect and experience in hard-core circles.
Guitarist Peter Mengede was a founding member of the tremendously successful Helmet, but left the band after "Meantime," Helmet's first release on a major label.
Drummer Peter Hines played drums for the hard-core legends The Cro-Mags, and Tom Capone played guitar for Quicksand, another highly regarded New York City hard-core band.
The New York hard-core sound of the mid 1980s was an anomalous and refreshing movement free from the stupidity and stage-antics of heavy metal and the crass commercialism of MTV techno-pop.
The raw, vital "New York School" of heavy-hitting, East Coast, hard-core punk first gave rise to now classic bands such as Helmet, and the latest generation of this movement boasts bands such as Handsome.
Most of the time, Handsome lives up to the reputation of its individual members, in spite of its silly name.
Produced by Terry Date (Soundgarden, White Zombie, Pantera), the songs on the band's album are more tersely controlled and refined than old-school hard-core.
But the aggressive edge is still prominent in the music, as well as the avant-garde willingness to experiment with dissonance and harmonics.
Handsome, in its better moments, eschews the dirty, slow-paced sound that more than one band with a heavy edge has succumbed to.
This is largely due to the second guitar in the band's lineup, a move which is usually extraneous in hard-core music. This is not the case for Handsome, which employs the second guitar to its fullest potential.
While their songs are still charged with blistering, heavily distorted basslines and rhythm guitars, they employ the second guitar artfully, as it plays uplifting melodies and counterpoints to the other components of the band.
Instead of screaming, normally a staple of hard-core music, vocalist Jeremy Chaitlain sings, and he sings well.
Chaitlain's tenor joins the second guitar in the higher scales, which emphasize and add to the complexity of the music.
Tunes such as the hit "Needles" (which may be made into a video sometime soon), "Panic Now," and "Mind's Eye" show off the band's talents particularly well.
The tightly timed and well controlled sound of Handsome shows how much hard-core music has grown up in the past decade.
However, Handsome's tremendous individual talents sometimes trip them up. The debut album is evidence that Handsome is a band still searching for its sound and struggling to incorporate everyone's individual talents into a unified whole.
While the album has an explosive start, things become bottled up with the sixth track, "Dim the Lights." At times, Handsome seems to be backpedaling, with a we've-heard-it-all-before-but-done-better chord progression.
"Lead Bellied," the seventh track, has similar problems. Yet even these tracks have the germs of what could be a great band. Far more often than not, Handsome produces a gritty, vibrant sound that is vital and refreshing.
While Handsome's first album is slightly rough around the edges, it nonetheless is the debut of a band which could be very big if they could better define their sound and keep on playing the distinct version of the hard-hitting New York sound.
