Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Rest in Fleas

Rest in Fleas (Northern Spy 074) is not Cloud Becomes Your Hand's first album, but it is the first that woke me up to them. They are an alt rock sextet with a very original instrumental-vocal mix of the peculiar, the avant, the musically strong and the driving.

I come away impressed with them, very much so. The combination of slacker vocals and a formidable mix of guitar, violin, bass, synth, drums and malletkat comes at you with eight contentful and smartly musical songs. The arrangements give you pause and the structure of the music tends to be pretty iconoclastic--with a complexity not often heard in alt but with more balsy-ness than you might find in a typical prog offering.

I will not invoke Zappa and Beefheart at this point, but there is a lot going on here that does not sound very much like those masters yet has the musical cornucopia of plenty like they did at their best.

I strongly recommend that you immerse yourself in this one. Thank you to Northern Spy for putting this out! Thank you to Cloud Becomes Your Hand for your musical acuity and courage!