Review Summary: Hands Like Houses depart from their sound in a hundred different directions with varying degrees of success, but their sound remains strongest when rooted in the sound they’ve developed since their formation.
I’ve been enamoured with Hands Like Houses ever since they released their electrifying sophomore record, Unimagine, in mid-2013. The album incorporated great post-hardcore and alt-rock elements for a fairly unique and refreshing sound within the typical ‘Risecore’ field they were grouped in with. Now, two albums later and having departed from Rise Records in favour of Hopeless Records, Hands Like Houses look to redefine themselves by trying... everything?
Let me be clear, I’m all for experimentation and expansion of sound, but considering how different the four singles released from the album before release, I was a little worried that Anon. would sound a little uneven in its sound. After all, with only 10 tracks and a total 32 minute runtime, some level of consistency is required in order to create a coherent ebb and flow within an album of such a short length.
Hands Like Houses haven’t particularly quelled those fears with Anon., but it succeeds in more ways than I imagined it would. The pop-inspired hooks and grungy 90s riffage work at least moderately well, but herein lies the issue with the record. Individually, everything here works (for the most part), but as a cohesive unit, the album falls apart.
Anon. to me communicates a lack of focus in writing for the band. It genuinely feels like the band are trying to write about five different albums at once, and it feels horrifically jarring at times. This album frequently jumps between several styles with varying degrees of success (and failure), and this is communicated immediately from the start; jumping from a modern anthemic pop-rock number with Kingdom Come, to a dull, uninspired grunge number with Monster (potentially being the worst song the band has ever written), immediately to a Jane’s Addiction-esque alt-rock track with Sick. The record immediately emphasises its lack of, ironically, any emphasis whatsoever, and this is a feeling that is never rectified throughout the album.
HLH seem to want to have their cake and eat it with this record, going only half-in-half-out with every sound they attempt, and the problem with this is everything here, as stated before, works individually, but it’s begging for a modicum more focus or at least a bit more time to establish a core sound around some other ideas. However, at only 10 tracks and 32 minutes, it really doesn’t have enough time to do that.
This album certainly has its high points though, and for as much as I’m not being kind to it I genuinely do enjoy a lot of what they’re doing here. They may have lost the explosive element that made their past albums feel so special to me, but a lot of the new ideas they’re putting forth work. The dark, grungy Black is potentially one of the best songs this band has ever made. It’s gritty, edgy and it works really well, and I can say that for most of this record. Songs like Overthinking, Half-Hearted, Tilt and Bad Dream are genuinely really enjoyable. The lyrical content might not be as strong as past records, but the heart of the band is still present on these tracks.
Production-wise the album is pretty great, too. While it lacks the explosive punch of their past work, it’s gritty and rough when it needs to be, and vice versa with their more polished pop-rock sound that they’re pushing on the record. The mix is decent, everything works as it needs to, and while there’s nothing outstanding (aside from Black, which has fantastic production), nothing is truly wrong here.
I believe if they had stuck with a single sound and expanded on it, instead of (sorry for being a bit crass) pussyfooting around exploring new sounds, this could have been a really great album, and you can hear that in most of these songs. But instead, we’re left with a collection of decent to uninspired/outright bad singles.
Anon. is not a truly bad album by any means, but it lives up to its name. It has no true identity or consistency, rather relying on a sequence of varyingly successful sounds that play more like a mixtape or a showreel than a coherent album.
