Review

Careless Hands

When Dreams Slip Through

Smiling C • 2021

There is hardly anything as bleak as post-punk performed with Dutch inoffensiveness. Whereby none of the band members are from the Netherlands, so much biographical correctness must be. But it sounds the same. Murky in the best, i.e. most consistent sense, of course. The drizzle is strong with this one, the sniffles are already kicking in, the coffee has gone cold on the counter. Careless Hands were two guys who met when they were studying in the Liverpool that still shone in the afterglow of the Beatles years. They soon found themselves in a home studio together. »When Dreams Slip Through« is a compilation of a few surviving tapes from that time, as the project was a short one: marriage and death quickly followed their time in Liverpool. Right at the beginning, you want to place the record next to the Nexda reissue (»Words And Numbers«), before the categorisation becomes more difficult. Spike and Durutti Column are understandably named as comparative greats in the album leaflet, on »Turning« you even have the Knopfler guitar, one song afterwards a dub bassline, and on the flip side I thought of Vampire Weekend once.