1994!
Thank You Arms and Fingers [12 inch] (2008)
Brian Shultz
You're at The Fest. You're stumbling around the streets of Gainesville, pretty loaded up on PBR and Sparks. In a drunken stupor, you wander into The Atlantic to watch some band you've never heard of. But things are kind of hazy and they seem rad, so you stick around since there's lots of gravelly shouted vocals, off-kilter punky post-hardcore-esque riffs and an overall upbeat vibe about the whole thing. You're barely even making sense of them as actual songs, but hey, the sound is enjoyable.
1994! could very well be that band.
Thank You Arms and Fingers sounds something like Midwest math-rock with more aggression and rung through the No Idea ringer. Then again, you could probably describe the last Bridge and Tunnel album the same way, which 1994! sound virtually nothing like. They're a little heavier and a little more corrosive, with less of a focus on memorability and more of a frenetic, "in-the-now" feel.
However, when the band dip into slightly more emotionally affected territory, like the change in volume and manic growling in "Reptile Dysfunction" or the poetic reflection of "Sexual Alien vs. Sexual Predator," that seems to be when 1994! is at their best. The weird guitar interplay in "New Holland 1995" is cool, too.
Damn promising and interesting debut. Thank You Arms and Fingers is short on stokeage parts but it's got a compelling and riffy flow about it.