About

If you wanted to sum up the sound of Mammal Hands you could do a lot worse than opening track "Quiet Fire." Even the title hints at the tensions and emotions absorbed through the way Nick Smart's piano builds a minimal motif out of some light percussion before negotiating the rhythmic challenge set by Jesse Barrett's drums. The music shifts with the piano leading the rhythm until the tension is released by Jordan Smart's saxophone solo. The patterns are minimal, repetitive and extremely effective in combination pointing to a more modern concern with texture that has some parallels in modern classical, electronic and ambient music. The absence of bass though pushes this away from the more directly rhythmic path taken so successfully by, say, GoGo Penguin and more towards the feel of some Nik Bartsch, Penguin Café Orchestra or even Matt Winn's later work as D*Note in the 1990s.

This is an album whose strengths accumulate over an extended period, the repetitive melodic motifs hooking the ear into progressively more discoveries over repeated listens. It's the sort of record where genres are shown as the artificial constructions, designed to sell us stuff, that they really are. So for all their melodic invention Mammal Hands do not, in truth, sit in the most commercial position in the market place -not wholly fitting any of the genre constructs that the lazy will fall back on. The flip side of this is that they have made a record that channels many different influences, subtly shaded by clever experiments, that if given a chance will give many hours of enjoyment. "Quiet Fire" indeed and highly recommended. – All About Jazz