When my wife was little, she dreamt of being a hand model, gesturing alluringly towards the various prizes on Bruce’s Price is Right. At the time, no artists were crafting music for people with her ambitions. In 2021, Saint Surly and Dyl Thomas addressed this with their predominantly instrumental track featuring a sample of Seinfeld’s George bemoaning the effects of stress on his money-making epidermis. More famously, Queens of the Stone Age closed their self-titled debut with ‘I Was A Teenage Hand Model’. A song about a washed-up has-been, chundering on a toilet floor. Not exactly inspirational material for budding gesticulators.
Fortunately, Human Leather have come to the rescue on Here Comes The Mind, There Goes The Body with the ballsy ‘QVC Hands’. A song that lurches and roars like a sleepy family hound bounding into action after spying a squirrel, with bassist and vocalist Amée Chanter bellowing the seedy implication “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 those cameras are gonna see some action to-night”.
The accompanying cry of “We wanna see those hands” provides a faint echo of a Shooting Stars catchphrase, furthering the comedy nods that began with various demo puns (‘Ronnie James Demo’, ‘Demmo Borgir’, etc.) on their first EP and continued with titles lifted from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Brass Eye before being dialled back to a solitary League of Gentlemen reference in the form of ‘Geoff Tips’ (he who famously won the mums) on 2019’s Succulent.
A fellow Royston Vasey resident appears on their full-length debut with Les McQueen’s quote ‘It’s a Shit Business, Glad I’m Out Of It’ materialising as a track title. The initially brutish song reveals itself to be unexpectedly melismatic, darting into swinging vocal cadences alongside multiple instances of cowbell.
Human Leather fans (Leatherists, if you will), who have been jonesing for fresh Leather for the past six years might be surprised by their new approach to dynamics, structure, tonality and, whisper it, melody. Don’t worry, they still sound like Lightning Bolt crossed with Electric Wizard and, with the exception of one prog-like dalliance over the 180 second line, all of the tracks on Here Comes The Mind, There Goes The Body slide in under the three-minute mark. But they have tweaked, tuned, and evolved their sound admirably.
‘They Enclosed The Common Land And Built A Fucking Lawn’ perfectly displays the complex intertwining of Amée’s oddly catchy riffing with drummer Thomas Close’s rolling double kick and pummelled snare. Their basslines and rhythms coalesce, rupture, re-synchronise, and retreat, allowing the other to go off on brain-boggling runs. They provide barrages of abusively battered drums and slippery bass licks that dance around high-pitched harmonies as often as they thrash about in the low-end waters, avoiding the speed sludge pitfalls of down-tuned wallowing and blast beat reliance.
Lyrically, the duo’s targets range from spoilt music industry brats to the smug benefactors-by-birthright of land long stolen. Their furious fingers cocked and pointed at those whose own greedy digits reside in amply stuffed upper crust pies. They ply a weirdly beautiful form of mayhem, throwing curveballs so often that you’ll start to think that straight lines ought to bend. And just when you think you’ve finally got them pegged, they lob in one final surprise in the shape of the post-outro acid-tronic remix of the pithily titled ‘Ain’t No Such Thing As Civilised, It’s Man So In Love With Greed, He Has Forgotten Himself And Found Only Appetites’, courtesy of Joe Garrick, complete with breakbeats and warping oscillators underpinning Amée’s cut-up pub rock yelps. Delivering all of this with glinting eyes and an infectious sense of humour, deserves plaudits a-plenty. You’ve got to hand it to them.
