Monday’s daydreams: Alex Hand Band and TAPE TRASH

TAPE TRASH – TT 4-EVER

Similar artists: Japandroids, Titus Andronicus, Cloud Nothings, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Spielbergs

Genre: Indie Rock, Alternative Rock

Someone breaks the door open and starts running into your house. You holding dangerously by a finger off of a cliff that feels like it is about to break at any second. Someone kissing you sensually before telling you that your relationship was never meant to be. 

This is what guitar music should sound like! And, for most people, this is what their favourite records as teenagers feel. They’re dramatic, action-packed and a little dangerous. They’re three-minute action flicks that never waste your time. 

TAPE TRASH’s “TT 4-EVER” looks to capture the very essence of your first and most-beloved rock records. It is powered by adrenaline and aims to create the same kind of chemical reaction within the listeners. 

TAPE TRASH’s “TT 4-EVER” doesn’t waste its gang choruses, its riffs or emotional lyrics. The goal is for these elements to help it be remembered out of any lineup of alt-rock bands. The band has put in the work to earn your affection. The ball’s in your court now. 

Alex Hand Band – Rambosilkovo Horo

Similar artists: Django Reinhardt, Rush, Taraf de Haidouks, Besh o droM

Genre: Progressive Rock

Most modern rock audiences born outside of Westernized countries couldn’t care less about their country’s folk music. But maybe they’ve just been framing it in the wrong way all along. 

In Romania, the country of my birth, the kind of music played by Alex Hand Band’s on “Rambosilkovo Horo” is played at weddings and religious holidays where audiences, drunk off cheap fruit brandy, yell “Hop, Hop” along to the rhythm as they break their glasses on to the ground. 

But Alex Hand Band, an American group, hears something beautiful in this kind of Eastern European party music. They see the start of a prog-rock adventure. And why wouldn’t it be? Jon Anderson dared to dream of a “Siberian Khatru”, and that’s not even a real thing. 

The result is something extremely technical and joyful. If you haven’t yet witnessed this kind of music in the setting for which it was designed, you’re bound to be pleasantly shocked. And if you have, you’ll work to accept it as a natural continuation of progressive rock.