These four New Zealanders are called Cut Off Your Hands, but some glitch in the music compartment of my brain always wants to call them Cut Off Your Hands Say Yeah. Fittingly, I screamed ‘Yeeeaaahhh!’ plenty of times during Cut Off Your Hands’ dynamite dance-rock freak-out.



I must have been watching some older videos or something, though, because these guys looked way less like Franz Ferdinand in real life: gone were the buttoned-down collars and too-coiffed hair, replaced with thinning T-shirts and straggly locks all around — but not in a bad way. And one running jump off the drum kit from front man Nick Johnston was all it took to demonstrate that their live feel was a bit different too. The frenzied, gritty edge that’s evident in their recordings, though not necessarily emphasized, rips through their live set.

That they kicked off hard and bouncy with ‘Oh Girl’ made me grin and shimmy like an idiot. Oh, but I wasn’t alone. The almost-full dance floor was loaded with people, which was a nice surprise, too — there’s nothing like going to a dance show where nobody’s dancing. Makes my insides cry.



One tight, tense song followed another in an honest-to-Christ blur of jumping, yelling, fist-pumping and sweating. For being such newbies (they’ve only been around for three years), the band displayed some serious skills in the crowd-riling department. They knew just when to slow us down, how long to keep us there and when to start spinning us back up again. And when they’re up there having a riotous time as well, it’s even better.

Somewhere in all this, I managed to hear Johnston scream “This one’s called ‘Expectations’” or “You and I!” in the nano-second breaths Hands took between songs. By the end of it, my hands were sore from clapping, my dress was damp with sweat and spilled beer and I had a shiny, new band crush.