Last week Parachute for Gordo went under our Band of the Day microscope, and it’s easy to look at them and see one of the most promising names in British post-rock. This isn’t a claim that comes without challenges however, and if you venture up into Yorkshire, boy do you find a challenge. It comes from Leeds-based Mahogany Hand Glider, a more experimental foray into the post-rock world that has been garnering somewhat of a cult following with live shows with bands such as Roller Trio and Wot Gorilla?, and hoping to enlighten more of the masses as we roll past this pesky “apocalypse” business and into 2013.
Earlier this year, the quintet let loose their first full EP Naked Huf, a three-track release that opens with ‘Trojan Huf’, a laid back introduction to the band’s world of colour and noise. Just over five minutes long, the piece is still the shortest of the three on the EP, being coaxed in by rather a relaxed duo of guitars. It’s a fairly tentative beginning, but come the two-minute mark the track explodes into life as with all the band’s work, and generally most good modern post-rock, it stays instrumental but doesn’t lose any of the inherent beauty that the band are clearly more than capable of lacing into their sound.
The introduction to following track ‘Fringe’ is anything but tentative, and the laid back beauty of ‘Trojan Huf’ is immediately buried under an avalanche of noise and sax, that almost sounds like the band threw everything they had at a wall to see what would stick, and everything stuck. Experimental indeed. There’s a certain schizophrenic charm to it however, and when it does settle down and you feel a little less concussed by the wall of sound, ‘Fringe’ rears its head as an incredibly enjoyable earworm of a track.
The brass slithers back into the piece around the halfway mark, and there’s a few very short staccato bursts from the sax and guitars, before it returns to the sax-driven hook that once heard, sticks with you for hours after. Saxophones aren’t perhaps the first instrument everyone would jump to when deciding what to incorporate into a post-rock sound, but Mahogany Hand Glider have stumbled on it, experimented (what with being “experimental” and all), and it’s turned out quite well, all things considered.
The final track on the EP is ‘This Isn’t Funny Anymore’, which, to give the short version, is a very likable track provided you can get behind the nagging thought of “whatisn’t funny anymore?”. For the long version, the track eases into its seven and a half minutes of life much the same relaxed way ‘Trojan Huf’ did, though it chooses to stay that way throughout this time. The sax returns for another brief cameo towards the end of the piece, but most of the track is driven by the same guitar combo of ‘Trojan Huf’, leaving it a very chilled ending to a solid trio of tracks.
I’m critical of using the term “experimental” to describe music, as experimenting has always struck me as a process rather than a genre. That’s not to take anything away from Mahogany Hand Glider, who have clearly delivered an incredibly strong first EP with Naked Huf. The five-piece certainly have a lot more to give the world, however, so hopefully 2013 is a good year for this very promising post-rock troupe.
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