Hello again friends! Back again with a single to review. It’s been about a month since the release of this single (9/30), and I’m FINALLY getting around to reviewing it. I wanted to put this out sooner, but life got kinda crazy over here (like, couch surfing and boilers exploding crazy), BUT better late then never!
I want to start out by saying that I love this single, a lot. Like, listen to it once and buy it for $10, a lot. And it’s their debut! I really, really hope this band – The Cruelty – keeps going, or at least puts out a full-length LP, because just this single is stellar.
Let’s get to it, shall we? It seems to me a prevailing theme in this track is the dichotomies in life that we just kind of live around, and avoid looking at. Homeless and housed, screaming and laughing, even down to the intro, the juxtaposition of some softly strummed, acoustic chords, immediately followed by heavy, overdriven electric guitar, grumbling bass, and overwhelming drums. The visceral, unsettling tragedy that the distance between these things can evoke is really quite elegantly expressed.
Co-vocalist/bassist Jeff Wright says, “Hand In Hand is a direct observation from a darker time in (bandmate) Cody’s life – shrouded in possibly one too many visits to the local dive bar. Written from watching a houseless person from afar while they had a breakdown – they quite literally dropped a Safeway cake on the hot pavement and ate it off the ground. After seeing that go down and meeting them, it was a reminder that when all things seem lost, sometimes all it takes is someone to lend a hand and guide you out of the dark.”
Even this precedent set by the intro doesn’t get to stay the same. It transitions into a bass lead, a simple plucked guitar riff, and a rim shot keeping beat. Here the vocals are introduced, gently crooning. Halfway through the verse, tension builds with a reintroduction of that acoustic guitar, quickly strumming, with more bass and complicated drumming.
Everything cuts out except that acoustic, playing those intro chords again, before getting thrown into the chorus. The back and forth between loud strummed chords, and a lilting, screaming riff, accentuates that feeling of being caught between two sides of the world. Gang vocals behind the lines “Head in your hands, you scream and shout”, I’m reminded of the feeling of being surrounded by people, but feeling stuck and alone.
A lovely break post-chorus, with a guitar riff leading the bass and drums into something more solemn in feeling. The drums still keeping with a complicated beat, holding a feeling of mildly controlled panic. In come the vocals, juxtaposing the homeless man from the chorus with someone in the lyricist’s own life. A delay effect and subtly increasingly layered vocals make it sound like someone talking with ghosts.
Cut again to that acoustic in the pre-chorus, and suddenly these two sides are talking to each other, as the acoustic repeats the chords of the electric. The two lines “Hand in hand, foot in mouth” and “Head in your hands, you scream and shout” are the only lines sung in this chorus. Again, in my mind, the lyrisist’s own ghosts from a failing relationship are talking with the memory of the homeless man on the street. Finally coming to a close with isolated vocals in the outro, the vocalist sounding drunk, almost talking, with the line “you scream and shout”.