Curious Hands Sea Monster

Curious Hands: Nick LaRue, Tyler Riggs, Jack Tuftee.

Recording information: Powell House Studios, Portland, OR.

The debut album by Portland, OR, noise pop trio Curious Hands plays like somebody in the band just found a secondhand copy of the Pixies' Surfer Rosa and hasn't listened to anything else for weeks. Hints of a few other influences creep in here and there -- the vocals of "Leaders" sound, inexplicably, like some kind of deadpan Neil Young parody, and the snarky "22/7" lifts a key bit from the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout" -- but the fractured song structures, tightly compressed lo-fi sound, and quiet-LOUD song dynamics are all about the Pixies. At 16 songs in 31 minutes, guitarist and singer Tyler Riggs seems at permanent risk of slapping some half-finished fragments together and calling it a song, although ironically the album's five-minute centerpiece, "Detachable," is the weakest track, featuring an endlessly mounting preamble that finally bursts into an incoherent, draggy mess that then takes forever to resolve itself. In fact, shorter tunes like "Orion" (featuring a yowling lead vocal and drummer Nick LaRue's apparent tribute to Meg White's style-over-competence aesthetic from the early White Stripes days) and the punky start-stop rush of "Surfacing" are the best things about Sea Monster. ~ Stewart Mason